CAROLL BROWN

THE BORDERLANDS

I caught the zombie weeping in the middle aisle, between breakfast cereals and
cookies, staring at an empty patch of moonlit wall near the ceiling. The broom
rested lightly in his hands, cradled in his dead fingers with its bristles still
flared at the bottom, as though he had stopped his sweeping in mid-stroke. That
lack of sound, the sudden hush, had drawn me down the stairs, as someone who
lived by the sea would have been surprised one night if the waves had suddenly
stopped their gentle shushing and broken in silence on the sand.

I had stopped my silent pacing in the hall above the store; an art that I had
mastered out of necessity and long practice, I spaced my footfalls carefully to
thread the maze of loose boards that would wake Gwen, tell her instantly that I
was out of bed again. If she found me here she would yell, plead, sulk in
silence, coerce me to return to bed, to sleep. To the visions that still came
every night, and that I still could not bear.

So at night I walked, measuring over and over the corridor that ran the length
of the building, from one end of the apartment to the top of the stairs that led
to the store below, until I collapsed from sheer exhaustion into utter darkness,
too tired to dream.

Until the night the broom stopped.

"Albert?"

I didn't realize at first that he was weeping, I'd never heard of such a thing,
and what could make a dead man weep? My first thought as I came down the stairs,
seeing him motionless and striped with light and shadow falling through the
shuttered window, was that something was wrong, that perhaps he had simply shut
down, as sometimes they did, falling over in their tracks at their employers'
feet, dropping their garden tools or the packages they were carrying, uncommon
as such incidents were, it was the possibility of them that had kept from the
zombies the right to drive.

But Albert was still standing, and it wasn't until I stepped closer that I saw
the trails, silver ribbons in the moonlight, that ran down his cheeks.

"Albert, are you all right?"

His jaw hung slack, his shoulders slumped, and his gaze never wavered from that
spot high on the wall. I followed it with my own eyes, straining to see what he
was seeing, but whatever he watched was visible only to a zombie's eyes. I
touched him lightly on the shoulder; I had never touched a zombie before, never
had to handle Albert in the year that he'd been working for me. The flesh of his
arm was unnaturally soft and pliant, like dough, and I shuddered.

"Albert," I said, a little more harshly.

After a long moment he lowered his gaze, turning toward me, and for a brief
instant I thought I saw something there, a fire in the emptiness, a spark of
"life." But that wasn't possible, and he turned away from me, shuffling off down
the aisle as the store filled again with the soft rasping of straw on linoleum.

In retrospect, it feels like it was that moment that the thought first entered
my mind. It's not possible, of course; I didn't yet know what I later learned,
hadn't yet discovered what Albert saw, what was to be seen through the eyes of
the dead. But perhaps some premonition, some shiver of a guess, had already set
my mind in motion.

And I noticed, as Albert walked away from me, that he had not stopped weeping.

Life has a way of pushing you in directions you never intended to go, of
carrying you in its currents to whatever eddy or tidepool it chooses to deposit
you. We had certainly never intended to own a comer grocery, my wife Gwendolyn
and I. That was too "normal" for us, so damnably normal that I used to wake at
night with knives in my stomach, the small but potent daggers of regret,
cowardice, self-loathing. We had wanted adventure, high times and glamor.
Unfortunately we were both dogged by an equally strong streak of reasonableness,
a prudence that belied our years. When I finished school, working my way through
as a stocker and then assistant manager at Brock's Groceries, we made plans to
escape the city, settle someplace where adventure lurked around the comer
(though you could still come home to a soft bed and a warm house at the end of
the day). Colorado, maybe. Or Idaho.

Depressions have a way of changing plans.

When the time came, we just couldn't justify packing up for parts unknown
without a job waiting, not in the state the country was in. The odds were
against finding anything, and we had neither the savings to wait it out nor the
passion to risk starvation. In the end, we settled.

I stayed on at Brock's, and Gwen at Swanson's department store, and we kept
telling ourselves that one day we would just do it, just pack up and go, but
right now we still owed on the car and couldn't afford to make the payments and
insurance without a steady income. As soon as that was paid off, we'd head east,
to the mountains.

Then came the furniture payments, and the credit card bills we'd racked up.

We bought Brock's the year I turned thirty. We'd thought long and hard, but in
the end couldn't pass up the security; old man Brock offered it to me at a
special price, seeing as how I'd been there thirteen years and basically running
it the last five. The bank considered me stable and gave me the loan.

And that was that. Roots. Foundations. We were stuck.

Then we told ourselves that we'd take great vacations, but we could never afford
much help, and with both of us working full time and then some at the store it
was impossible for us both to be off at the same time. Someday, we told each
other. One of these days we'll hire some more help, promote Bobby to Assistant
Manager, let him run the day-to-day, and then we'll be free to go whenever we
want. Someday.

So of course, when they began offering the zombies, we snatched one up right
away.

"Albert?"

The zombie turned toward Dr. Spaar, who checked a box on his clipboard and gave
a nod that transformed into a shake of his head.

"I don't know what to tell you, Mr. Richards. In every test that I can run here,
Albert checks out just fine. Motor control, homeostatic functions, sensory
response, everything seems fine. I don't know what's wrong."

Albert faced front again, his eyes unblinking and locked on the wall, as if he
were supremely interested in the six food groups as delineated by the FDA's
poster. In fact, he probably couldn't even see the poster through his tears.
Albert wept almost constantly now; it was why I had brought him to a doctor.

The second night I found him standing in the middle of the store, gazing up at
nothing with overflowing eyes, I began to worry. After the first incident, I had
made a perfunctory search for any information on weeping zombies, assuming it to
be a rare but explicable phenomenon with highly technical causes, perhaps even
something involuntary. I had been surprised to find absolutely nothing. Nothing
in the local libraries, nothing in the free-access databases, no rumors among
friends and acquaintances of anything of the sort that I had seen.

Perhaps, I thought, it was just an anomaly.

Two nights later I found him again in his state of . . . what, despair? Can a
zombie feel despair, or any emotion? I had thought not, thought that had been a
motivating factor behind the drive to hire them. They worked steadily,
unemotionally, reliably; almost like robots in those stories. Not that anyone
would mistreat them for it. After all, they were still people, just of a
different sort. They had families, their living kin. They had everything the
living had, except for one thing: they had no mind.

A week after the first incident, Albert came in weeping and nothing would make
him stop. He still worked; he just wept while he did it. I thought it best to
bring him for a checkup.

"The trouble is," Dr. Spaar was saying, "we just don't know enough about the
brain still. Or about zombies. In many respects they're like coma patients:
certain involuntary systems continue to function even though there's no EEG
activity. But obviously they're more than that. The zombie have consciousness,
of a sort. They see, hear, touch, feel. But do they think Do they experience
emotion? Is this sadness," he touched Albert's dam cheek, "or is this watering
eyes? It would be helpful if they would speak t us, tell us what they're
experiencing. Sometimes it's like treating an infant.

"Would speak?' I assumed they couldn't talk," I said.

Dr. Spaar just shrugged. "They don't, but not for any physical reason: not most
of them anyway. Another one of the unanswered questions about zombies."

He smiled at me and shrugged again, gave Albert a pat on the shoulder. He didn't
know, didn't particularly care. Nobody particularly cared about the dead. Unless
it was one of theirs.

Karen was born on the Fourth of July, so that later I would tell her the whole
country celebrated her birthday. Gwen, exhausted after thirty-seven hours of
labor, collapsed into a well-deserved sleep, and I sat with our daughter for a
time, until the doctors told me to put her down and leave her be, to go home for
the night and get some sleep myself. Instead I lit sparklers and fireworks and
danced through the streets like a madman.

She was the type of child that everyone, not just grandparents, calls "an
angel," which meant she mostly took after Gwen. Physically, she was my wife in
miniature, with the same small nose, the widely spaced green eyes, the hair just
one brown tone shy of blonde. And her smile, the mischievous cocked-head grin.

Inside, she was Daddy's little gift, and she clung to me and followed me around
the store as soon as she could move, first at a crawl and later in that
perpetual run, half a step ahead of a fall forward, of the two-year-old. For a
time I carried her in a rucksack on my back as I worked around the store,
fearful of mischance and mischief, humming songs to her and feeling her small,
warm breath on my neck. Gwen told me I looked like a Bolivian housewife, and
besides the child would never learn to walk if her feet never touched the
ground. I gave in, and turned her loose.

For months I still thought I felt her breath on my neck, and would smile.

Fortunately, the zombies had already begun appearing by that time, had been
around long enough to have entered the work force. Mitchell, Albert's
predecessor as general helper at the store, had been left as Bobby's sole help
in the days we were gone, the almost two days of labor, of Gwen screaming with
the delights of natural childbirth and me hovering and pacing and chain smoking
the celebratory cigars I had bought. By all accounts they managed things quite
well, to our pleasant surprise.

Even more surprising, as we discovered when Gwen returned to work and brought
our daughter with her, Mitchell was. good with children. He handled Karen like a
flower, hovering protectively nearby whenever we let her play on the floor in
front of the cash register, and though initially images of Boris Karloff as
Frankenstein's monster crowded my mind so that I vowed never to let the two of
them near daisies or wells, Mitchell never raised a finger against her, never
even bumped her accidentally.

I learned later he'd had two daughters in life, both of whom he'd survived.

Something is happening in their brains; it's not raw pulp, I'm convinced of
that. They tell us, for those who care, that they lack higher brain functions,
that the brainstem and cerebellum still function for the most part, but the
cerebrum and cortex are almost functionless. They have no memories, no real
thought, just baseline comprehension and reaction; but Mitchell remembered his
daughters, and saw in mine a reflection of them.

I know that look in his eye, recognize it in hindsight. I see it in the morning
when I look in the mirror, written in the dark circles of sleeplessness. Loss,
longing and delicate shades of madness.

And now I know why Albert weeps.

I drove him out to the small tract house that was his family's home. A cute
little box of a place, identical to the rows upon rows of cute little boxes that
surrounded it, all of which had sprung up in the forties and fifties, in the
explosion of returning vets. They were old now and starting to collapse, the
ones not kept up, but it said something to me that slapped-together houses of
fifty years past looked better than "quality-built" homes erected ten years ago.

They didn't have a porch, just a concrete stoop that jutted out from the front
door. Barbara Ann Davison sat on it, a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the
other, talking with her husband Bill and a neighbor. I could hear her laughter
as I drove up.

The neighbor glared darkly at me, muttering something to Barb and scurrying off
as I opened the door for Albert.

"Hi, Mr. Richards." Barb nodded as we walked up. "Hello, Dad." I noticed she had
to take a swig of beer before the second greeting.

Albert didn't acknowledge her, simply stepped past her and into the house
beyond. She flinched as his arm brushed her shoulder.

"What brings you but here to the suburbs, Mr. Richards.?" Bill's voice boomed in
false conviviality.

"Well, I wanted to bring his paycheck by --"

"Could've mailed it as usual," Barb said.

"-- and talk to you about something."

"Dad?"

I nodded.

For a long moment I wasn't sure what she might do. She stared at the cracked
cement, the cigarette dangling between her fingers and the smoke rising in
chaotic swirls. After a long while she sighed.

"Bill, go in and make sure Dad's okay, willya.?"

Bill nodded and patted his wife on the shoulder, following the zombie inside. We
all knew zombies didn't need looking after.

I waited until Bill was well gone. "You've noticed it, too.?"

"The crying? Yeah, I've noticed it."

"What is it?"

She shook her head, refusing to look at me, staring off down the street of
houses that seemed to reflect away in both directions infinitely, like two
mirrors held facing each other.

"What do you think it is.?"

"No idea," she said. She gave a harsh, barking laugh. "Dad never was what you'd
call a real happy person. Even when he was alive."

She lapsed again into silence.

"There's something you're not telling me," I said.

"Just thinking how to say it," she answered. "All these zombies and stuff, it's
real hard to talk about. Oh, I expect you don't have much problem. He's just a
guy that comes and works for you, stays with you five days a week, good worker
once you get used to the sight of ligaments and muscles and shit hanging out of
him. But that happens pretty quickly, doesn't it. He's just an employee. You
ever had one of yours come back? Just when I get used to the idea that him and
Morn are gone, gone for good and not just in Florida until May, just when I can
say 'they're dead' without breaking up, he shows up." She looked away again; her
eyes were dry, but a deep flush colored her cheeks, and her voice skipped along
in breaths. "Like that. All gross, it still scares me to look at him. He doesn't
talk, doesn't hold me close, just sits there staring. But what can I do? He's my
dad."

"I'm sorry." It's pathetic and useless, and it's all I can say. She was right; I
didn't know what it was like. Part of me wanted to ask her, "Isn't it better
that he's here at all? He's still your dad, and aren't you grateful for a second
chance? Not all of us got that, some of us would kill for that." But I had no
right. Instead I just asked, "When did you first find him crying?"

"About two weeks ago. I woke up, middle of the night some time. Thought I heard
a noise or something, so I get up and look down the hall. Dad usually sits in
the chair in the living room at night, right where the hall empties out there,
so I can see him when I look down the hall. Only he wasn't there. And I hear
this noise, like I left a window open and the wind's coming through. So I follow
it.

"Dad's standing in the kitchen. Just standing there in the middle of the room,
looking up by the ceiling. His arms are out, like he's reaching for something,
and in the moonlight I can see he's crying. He's crying and I didn't even know
they could cry, and he never cried once while he was alive, not that I saw. And
he's making this sound, this whisper, I got up real close, and he just ignores
me like I'm not there, so I can hear. And he's saying 'Maggie, Maggie,' over and
over, looking up at the wall."

Barb's voice had become a thin scratch of sound; the effort to keep it steady
made the veins in her neck rise in cords beneath the skin. I glanced up, and
Bill stood behind her, inside the screen door. He looked as if he might cry
himself; he wanted to come out, to comfort his wife, but she was not the type of
woman who accepted such things, so Bill held his ground.

"Maggie was my mother's name," she finished, and finally she turned toward me, a
flame in her eyes, a fire of grief like I'd seen in her father's eyes nights
before. "How come she didn't come back, too, Mr. Richards? She was with him when
they died. How come he came back alone?"

I didn't know, and I had no words of comfort, because I could feel my own grief
overwhelming me, and a damnable hope and despair. I drove off quickly, leaving
her alone on the stoop, watched over by the indistinct form of her husband,
half-hidden by the screen and the shadows indoors.

Karen grew fine and strong and all the things a parent wishes for a child. Gwen
and I, for the first time, I think, accepted our lot in life, the place we'd
ended up. We might not have a life to sing about, but we had Karen, and she was
more than compensation. Maybe, we told ourselves, when she's grown, when she's a
young woman and leaving for her own life we'll think again of adventures and
faraway places. For now, we have paradise here.

Five short years, half a decade of paradise, is too cruel. It would have been
better, I screamed at night, never to have given us a taste of it at all, to
have left us childless and bitter to the end of our days rather than . . .

A car. Like so many others every day, but it's always others. It's never our
own. A car trying to beat a red light, failing, not even close, accelerating to
squeeze through before the flow of traffic changed direction, failing.

Gwen and Karen, pulling into the intersection.

They were both belted, strapped in and secure, as well protected as they could
be. Gwen had become quite fanatic about that, had even lobbied for stronger seat
belt laws after Karen was born. You protect your own.

Sometimes it's not enough.

Gwen lived, to her great and utter despair. The car hit the passenger side.
Karen's side. The cheap metal crumpled like paper. It drove inward, slamming
into Karen, into her side and her head, the window shattering and spraying
across her face.

They said she never felt a thing. I don't believe them. In my mind's eye I'm
with her, and time slows so that every instant is an endless moment of
recognition and fear: the sight, out of the comer of our eye, of the oncoming
car, our mouth, opening in a high scream, the door bulging, reaching for us, the
glass bending in, gleaming like a bubble before it pops, bursting over us; the
long, clawing descent into darkness.

Five short years of Heaven before we were cast out. You learn sympathy for the
devil.

The funeral was well attended, for Karen was a well-loved child, and a small sea
of black-garbed children and adults covered the manicured lawn. Gwen stood
beside me still as a stone, her face locked in an impassive gaze into the
distance. Bruises marked her cheek and forehead, and when we were alone I'd seen
her wince when she walked as the broken ribs ground at her, but this was all the
damage the crash had caused her, physically. And that was her punishment, she
had told me one night. We'd sat, huddled in each other's arms, and I'd been
unable to stop my own endless torrent of grief and longing, and Gwen had watched
in silence, dry-eyed. Shamed and raging, I had screamed at her, accused her of
not loving our daughter, of not caring. I don't know how she didn't hate me. in
that moment.

"This is my punishment," she'd said, touching the green and black stains on her
face. "This is God laughing at me. He took my baby, and all he left me was
this." In some odd way it would have been kinder to her if she'd suffered more,
been more severely injured, participated more fully in Karen's death. Instead
she'd been shut out entirely, left to live with it and unable to justify her own
pristine condition.

I had held her then, and asked her forgiveness, and cried through the night.

And now her eyes were still dry and her mind was far away. I looked at the
crowd, seeing faces I knew, those I didn't, all wrinkled in grief and pity as
they gazed on her pathetically small casket and the minister spoke in solemn
tones about resurrection and rebirth.

My eyes fell on Mitchell. He stood somberly, as he always did, and somewhere he
had found a dark suit. It was moth-eaten, holed through in several spots, many
years out of date and exuding an aura of dusty dinginess. It so perfectly
belonged on a zombie that I almost laughed out loud.

And bit my tongue as my brain leapt to associations. Zombies, resurrection. Dear
God, it had never occurred to me before that moment. No one thinks of the dead,
until it's one of theirs.

No one understood, no one could predict who would come back. Would Karen return
to us in a few weeks' time? Would we see her little body shuffling blankly
around our home, an empty husk, a flameless candle? Could we stand that? Could
we live with our child, five years old and no love in her eyes, forever?

I don't remember the rest of the service.

I never told Gwen of my thoughts, and if similar ideas occurred to her, she
never told me. We went about our lives in fear and hope.

When it was obvious Karen was not coming back, I sat up all night and cried. I
don't know if they were tears of thanks or of despair, that I would truly never
see my little girl again.

The zombie found me weeping in the moonlight, huddled behind the counter in the
dark store. He never said a word, of course, never showed any emotion; he just
reached out a hand to me, reached down and helped me to my feet.

July 18th. The day was always like this, always found me, by its last minutes,
crying someplace. But it wasn't usually this bad, this overwhelming. She would
have been twelve years old, I'd thought to myself, if seven years ago today Gwen
had taken a different route, or the other driver had, or I'd held Gwen for five
seconds longer at the door before they left, or Karen. Just as I'd thought, in
years past, she'd be eleven today, ten today, if only, if only.

But this year there was Albert, who held his hand down to me and pulled me to my
feet from behind the counter. When I looked at him, I could see he was weeping
too.

What a pair we made! A middle-aged man and a dead man, standing in the night and
weeping for our loves.

"Is that why you cry, Albert?" I said, brushing away my own tears and sniffing
like a schoolboy, not really talking to him but simply giving voice to my morbid
thoughts. "Because you'll never see Maggie again? Like I'll never see my little
Karen?"

Albert turned away.

But there had been something there, something that froze the tears on my face
and stopped me, suddenly. Something between derision and pity. From a zombie.

"Albert?" He had disappeared down the rows, and I glanced up and down them in
the darkness, trying to find him, to know what that look meant.

I found him standing between the breakfast cereal and cookies, looking at a
spot, hidden in darkness, high on the wall, weeping furiously.

"Albert, what are you seeing? Tell me, please."

His lips, I could see now as the moon slid through the window, were moving
though no sound escaped from them. I leaned closer, straining with both eyes and
ears, trying to decipher the movement of his mouth, and I recalled Barb's story
of the day before. It was easy to see after that.

"Maggie," he whispered over and over. "Maggie, Maggie."

"What do you see, Albert? Dammit, tell me." My voice was a desperate whisper. "I
have to know."

And, impossibly, he answered me. A zombie, a being that supposedly could not
speak, who felt no emotion and did only what he was told, answered me, told me
what he saw, what I think they all see. And know I knew why the zombie wept, and
why all of them, as we would now if we followed them at night or into their
private places, wept. Albert just couldn't control it as well as the others,
couldn't keep it inside, the pain and despair and longing that sprang from the
curse of the zombie, trapped between two worlds and seared into silence.

"Heaven," he said. "I see Heaven."

I stand in the dark. Albert's not with us anymore; no zombies are, not after
what I learned about them. Not when I know the pain they're in. And yet. . .

So I'm alone in the dark, and the knife's blade glints coolly in the moonlight
that falls in strips of light and darkness through the pulled blinds. I've left
a note for Gwen, so she won't be surprised when she comes down to the store;
she'll be shocked, angry, disgusted, alone, but she'll know what to expect,
lying in the aisle between breakfast cereals and cookies.

Through the heart will be fastest, easiest, least messy. It needs to be quick,
so that the brain shuts down automatically; I've read that much, at least, about
zombies. People whose brains have been physically damaged never come back, and
there's some evidence that lingering deaths are less likely to return. A gun
would be quickest of all, I guess, but I can't leave Gwen with that.

The best of both worlds. I'll come back-- somehow, someway-- and so I'll still
have Gwen, still have the sight of her that I've gloried in since the day we
met. And when I can bring myself to look, with a zombie's sight, over the
threshold, into Heaven or whatever you choose to call it, into the place that
Albert looked and saw his Maggie, I'll see my Karen, my little girl. And I'll
whisper her name at night, and weep in solitude so that Gwen will never see the
tears on my cold cheeks, will never know and never be tempted to follow me to
the borderlands.

I raise the knife, and I'm weeping already.