This was exactly twelve years ago. Four days later you will discover a surprising alternative to suicide.
In the waiting room of Dr. John Mendez the corpses of a woman and her teenage son are being unwoven from the stiff limbs that have held them through the week. Dr. Mendez lays the bodies out on the floor of an examining room. There are already three other bodies there, stacked on the cushioned table. There is such an abundance of diving board stiffness in the people that surround him that Mendez finds himself performing loose little dances to distinguish himself. He is conscious of not being dead. He is less conscious of the people around him not being alive, and so along with his dancing he’s carrying on conversations with the cadavers.
He jigs down to a squat and pulls blond hair off the youth’s forehead.
“Hello young man.”
Mendez steps around, still in a squat, so that he’s looking across the teenager’s chest.
“Now we have no choice. We’re starting to really get to know one another, aren’t we?”
Mendez places a hand on the boy’s chest.
“You’re a beautiful lad, Doomsday Boy. You’ve backed off a bit from all this, though, haven’t you?”
He lifts the youth’s forearm and his entire upper body comes off the floor.
“I can’t believe that you’re like wood now, Doomsday Boy! Five days ago I said to your mother that little bags of marijuana never killed anyone. And now where is she? There, beside you. What a pair. Like planks of wood! Jesus has left a few carvings for me.”
Mendez pushes the tip of his finger into the hard skin between the boy’s eyebrows.
“I think you were just starting to go crazy with the world — right in here, Doomsday Boy, where your eyebrows are preparing to reach across and join hands. The long Ontario boy, now just a little carving of the rest of the world.”
A telephone rings in the reception area across the hall. Mendez lets it ring three times before tapping the boy’s shoulder with a closed hand and rising to his feet. He counts the other corpses with his eyes. “All you exhausted and serious people. I think I will take a walk to the telephone.”
One week ago the plague of cannibals in Ontario stopped moving. The population that had been crouched in a corner, under the shadow of hands dripping offthe walls, with their own arms held protectively over their heads, had been holding their breaths. One week ago the zombies sat down quietly, the spirit of revenge, of murder, slipping from them. As the population exhaled it felt the silly relief of survival. We began to clean our parks and fields of the dead and the near dead. Slowly the province became less self-absorbed.
We discovered that while we were fleeing from vampires a giant in Texas began tossing babies like footballs from a bridge, breaking their little bodies open against the pebbles of a dried riverbed.
The receding hairline of the land continued its steady progress while we were gone and the little black glasses perched on the world’s nose lost some of their effectiveness. If we can accept our recent history, then we can now take a place among the slow cells that muddy the thought of the world.
Dr. John Mendez has been called to the Campbellcroft Secondary School. A makeshift morgue has been set up in the gymnasium, and the doctor is part of a team sent in to organize the dead. Over four thousand bodies have been hastily piled in this refrigerator. Steam climbs out of the limbs and wiggles, like white worms, across cliffs of dead people. The mist becomes dew on the upper lips of faces that are turned toward the steel rafters.
A plywood table sits in a narrow valley, and on it a body is being opened by Dr. Mendez.
“Well, my sleepy little man, this is a famous nap you’re having now, isn’t it?”
Mendez glides four fingers under the flat upper lobe of the lung he’s laid against Les Reardon’s side. He depresses his thumb through the tiled pink of the tissue, squeezing out a black bubble from within.
“Oh dear, these last few breaths didn’t help matters much, did they?”
Mendez lifts the edge of the body, accidentally pushing the lung from the table. He squeezes his hips against the edge, but the organ slips through and swings under the plywood, suspended like a pendulum. The weight of the lung tugs where it’s attached inside the chest cavity and the heart springs up onto the corpse.
“Little monkeys! Come on, get back up here!”
Mendez rests the chain of organs between the arm and the chest.
“Well, you rascal, before I let you go about exploding all over the place I have something to tell you.”
Mendez drags a thumbnail through a burnt crust that covers the shoulders.
“Now listen carefully: I think you must have had an awful fire at your back. And as you were opening your mouth to warn me, the air crawled in and blistered you on the inside.”
