Is This the End of Zombie Shakespeare?

Garry’s dad ate people like my dad for breakfast. Garry’s dad was CEO of StayRight International, a company that hit it big when people started looking for a way to keep their loved ones in immaculate condition while they waited for them to un-die. Since you can never tell how long it’s going to take, StayRight made a killing on keeping people in large freezers. They were also able to side-step some of the time-constraint laws involving human cadavers, since the bodies technically became property of an international company, they could be kept for as long as they wanted.

Garry’s dad gets a new secretary on a monthly basis. He fires the slow ones because he is a hot-headed man and the smart ones because he is a bitter man. He hires and fires the married ones just to get on their husbands nerves. My mom was his secretary about five years ago. Garry said his dad would always brag to his buddies when he slept with one of his secretaries. Garry would hear snippets of these conversations: birthmarks, techniques, clothes; snippets of proof of his triumphs. And I believed Garry because every time he told me, his dad would fire another one. My dad worked for Garry’s dad’s dad twenty years ago, then Garry’s dad for the last ten years. My dad sticks thermometers, tubes, and heart monitors into zombie orifices for ten hours a day, but he isn’t very relevant to my life up until now. Garry’s dad loved pranks and jokes, he patted his son on the back, or head, or shoulder, every time Garry mentioned a new feat he had accomplished. Garry’s dad was the one that suggested we go to the zombie theater.

***

The box-office zombie looked at me unconvinced. His lips puckered up like a purple blue volcano. "Suicide," I said, while throwing my thumb back towards the three kids sitting on the steps reading the newspaper together. He looked at the red marks on their necks and nodded, pleased. He handed me four tickets to the noon showing of Gone with the Wind. We normally wouldn't go this early but Garry had guitar practice at five and Sal and Jamie's mom wouldn't let them out past four anyway. I stuffed the tickets in my pocket and took my time walking back towards the steps where they waited. Garry eyes were still rolling over the newspaper. "Any good ones?" I asked. I lean my shoulder into a thin green light-post that in no way feels comfortable or casual.

"Just some nobodies, you know? An accountant, someone's grandma, some guy with a funny name. O-LAU-DUH" He said, while tracing his finger over the bold print. "You never see anyone too important anymore. Except Babe Ruth 'bout two months ago. My dad told me, about fifteen years ago you couldn't go a day without seeing someone famous turning up. Now it’s just nobodies; old women, and angsty teens and all that."

"Except Shakespeare." I add.

"How's your mom?"

"Still dead."

***

We were sitting behind a family of sinkers. The father's neck was broken, but he hid it with a tall-collared shirt and a neck-brace. I pushed my elbow into Jamie's side and when she looks back, I smile. I point over to the child, about five years old, still the color of swamp water. Jamie's mouth stretches into a look of disgust. "Shhh." I whisper into her ear, as close as I can get.

I look around and made sure that none of them noticed us. I could only imagine the anger they would feel if they knew we weren't one of them. Zombies tend to snub their noses at normal people, like they had gone through some great ordeal we couldn't comprehend. They don't make a fuss in public when we gawk at their missing arms, or the holes where an eye or cheek used to sit. If they did, the police would probably haul them off to a crematorium, no questions asked. But this theater was not public domain. It was their place. They could eat pigs brain, or heart, or whatever they ate without people glaring at them (or vomiting). They could laugh when their teeth fell out here.

It was like watching lions on the T.V. At the zoo, lions are fine and good, but they generally tend to loaf around and wait for a zoo-keeper to place a dead chicken in their mouth. The lions in the zoo seem flaccid, bereft of life. But on television, they were natural. They played with each other. Hunted their prey, and gorged on the entrails of what they caught. I was the sheep in lions' skin in the theater. I definitely didn't want them to find out and gorge on my entrails. Garry said his dad had seen them do it once, in the old days, when they first started showing up.

I looked back at Jamie, the faux rope-burn lining her neck, eyes bloodshot, and skin paled with foundation. She looked pretty as zombie. Just as I move in to whisper to Jamie, an arm reaches over and blocks my connection to her, Garry pushes his head back to give me a wink.

***

Everyone slowly shuffled out of the theater. At one point, the movement stopped because someone’s arm and baby had fallen to the floor when the load became too unbearable. Moans were heard in the crowd. It smelled like the paper factory in Glenwood two counties over and the heat was becoming unbearable. Luckily, the man was able to find his arm and baby, and everything started flowing again.

Outside, we all ran down the long staircase. Garry bumped into an old man zombie and it fell with a heavy crunch sound. We kept running until we turned the corner and got three blocks away into the where the human district started. I stood bent over, hands on my thighs, breathing and laughing about the old man zombie, but right when I lifted my head up to give Garry a high-five, I saw him kissing Jamie and so I went back to looking down and breathing.

The three of them kept walking down the main street since Jamie and Sal’s mom’s house was close to where Garry had to go. I waited for the #3 bus to take me to Downtown and the Natural History Museum, so I could finish my school report on Zombie Shakespeare. An old Asian lady was waiting at the bus stop too. She couldn’t have been taller than five feet, and it looked like she was perpetually carrying a heavy load, though nothing was on her back. She smiled at me with a half empty smile. Half her teeth were rotted away, or barely there, the rest were made of gold. When she waved her boney, vein-mapped fingers, I let out a smile and turned away. Sometimes, the living look just as grotesque as the dead.

***

At the museum, Zombie Shakespeare sat on the same wooden desk he used to write Antony & Cleopatra; the desk was shipped in a large wooden box by some fine philanthropist in Prague, and Shakespeare was shipped in a large wooden box from his home of Stratford-upon-Avon. The museum had given him authentic replicas of the clothes he had worn back in his day. The frilly wide-laced collar and red and green striped doublet clashed with his pasty skin. The museum had replaced missing patches of skin with rubber and make-up but altogether his body looked disconnected. The pale tinge of his face, and the appearance of heavy black gloves on his hands to hide his missing extremities made him seem unlike a normal undead-come-back kind of guy.

He never smiled. And when I thought about it, I’d never seen a zombie smile. When they laugh, they open their mouths up and let out distinct HA’s, as if they were trying to yawn, but it kept getting cut off. I thought about Zombie Shakespeare, practicing in front of a mirror, HA HA HA HA; quivering at the sight of his paled skin, pretty clothes, and his fear of the porcelain fountains that continue to go off when he passes by them.

***

“Have you seen any of your plays performed lately?” I ask him.

“Yes. It was Romeo and Juliet, set in America, between The Democrats and The Republicans,” he says.

“How’d you like it?”

“I think they missed the point.” He pauses for a slight second and quickly adds in, “They don’t laugh at venereal diseases as much either anymore.”

“People are sensitive about their venereal diseases,” I tell him.

He looks down at his black, leather shoes and squishes an ant taking food back to its home.

“Do you have any interest to write more?” I say.

“No,” he says.

I imagine Zombie Shakespeare’s life. Going from museum to museum, answering questions for silly high school students who want to date their best friends’ girl. I wonder if he has to eat, sleep, cry, love, think; he certainly does not have to die.

“You ever see Gone with the Wind?” I ask Zombie Shakespeare, putting my pen down.

“HA. HA. HA,” he laughs.

“So you liked it more than the Romeo and Juliet you saw?” I ask.

“It was still about humans.”