We imagine the lives of the silent.

It’s impossible not to.

I was at the zoo, at that time of day I used to enjoy most, back before any of us had turned. It had been the time of day when dusk could still catch animals in odd moments of, well, being animal. Even if they’d spent all day gazing out through plate glass at crowds of zoo-goers, even if they grew up in concrete boxes painted (for our benefit) to look like a jungle, as twilight approached, the apes still built nests (straw provided), the red pandas climbed their pipe “trees,” and all the heat and threat of the night outside—the real night beyond their bars—seemed within reach, their nostrils attuned to its night scent, their ears to the crickets, a rustle of brush, the muffled beating of wings or a tiny cry in the dark….

That long-ago dusk—another lifetime ago—I’d been watching the polar bear pace as it must have paced all day. And the day before. And the day before that—maybe it had been pacing since before it could remember—back and forth, and back and forth, over and over with a repetitive motion so exact it could have been mistaken for a video loop or a mise en abyme if it weren’t so deadly: the bear would break into a trot aimed at the wall at the far end of its enclosure, and then, just before it ran head-on into the concrete, it would arch up, swing around, and reverse direction, whereupon it would walk briskly to the other end of its enclosure and repeat exactly the same motion, like a fly ramming itself against a window over and over and over and over and over to get to an outside that it seemed to crave with every cell in its body, its hunger to get to the outside so intense that it would beat itself to a pulp against that glass wall before it could give up trying.

What goes through the mind of a bear? Or rather, what had You-the-Living been thinking?—you zoo-goers—and in those days there were lots of you—far more than the few that I hunt today. Over and over, you—or rather, I should say we—we used to flock to the zoo, neither to hide nor to hunt, but to watch: moms with their kids in those animal-shaped strollers; teenagers hanging over the moat that separated us from the bear, pointing, making faces at its “antics,” or those, like me, who simply stood in silence, watching its hypnotic motion as though gazing into a fire or the endless breaking of waves upon a shore…

Thinking back on it, though, it really isn’t hard to imagine what we’d been thinking, as Elizabeth says—us with our zoos, and lab cages, and assembly-line feedlots and killing and stock-yard butchering that Henry Ford used as the model for the assembly line—which the Nazis later used as the model for their extermination camps. Disassembly to assembly to disassembly. Makes a neat equation, doesn’t it? Makes it hard to not think of animals in a certain way, don’t you think? And by animal, I mean, You-the-Living, too, of course, for once any entity is thought of as an animal everything becomes possible. By which I mean, back then—back before my own transformation—I, like most of Y-t-L, would have agreed with René, who thought that since animals don’t have language, they can’t die.

I now know, of course, that silence can be the cruelest language of all.

But that came later. As I watched that bear pace, I tried to imagine its state of mind, the shake that each turn at the wall gave the snow-globe of its skull stirring up a blizzard within: how vast the white Arctic must be within the mind of an animal that had evolved over millions of years to range over its frozen world, spending more of its life hunting seals in the churning, open sea than it spends on land, doing all the things polar bears do—no, say rather, all the things polar bears need to do—the need to roam vast white spaces a kind of lust in their bodies, the way that thousands of years of evolution had put into chimpanzees a need to climb trees when night fell. What must it be like to be one of those poor creatures whose body tells it to climb up into a tree as night falls, who knows, the way a hand knows to jerk from a flame, that spending the night on the ground was an invitation to be pounced on in your sleep, eaten alive. And then, despite what the body knows, its enclosure prevents it from climbing to safety because there is nothing to climb. How could the animal not feel it was being waterboarded?—that is, how could it not feel like you would if someone held you underwater—go on, hold your breath as you read this—try to live as a fish, not a fish in water but a fish forced to live as a human, flopping and drowning in air; try to imagine some unknown, unseen inquisitor holding your head under water until you answer his silent questions. Would you feel like Winston, his head in a cage with a rat, screaming his terror?—willing to do anything to make it stop? A scream, that we only see as pacing?

Lying here in wait, thinking of myself watching that bear, I now understand how monstrous I had been. Whatever I said about that animal would become its “truth” for I owned its narrative; I—in no small way—was able to control this other creature’s life without even touching it. I told stories and it could not. I watched, and it abided. I spoke, and it endured.

Here comes one now. I can hear you before I see you. Degradation of the cornea; myopia. From what I can tell, most of us are colorblind, too. I mean, we zombies can squint slantwise, the way you might glance at a crayzee on the subway, but it’s hard to actually look around. It’s hard to not just stare at the ceiling as if flat on our backs. You’d think some kind soul would be considerate enough to put something up there to give a poor zombie something to look at. But no. It doesn’t occur to you. That’s why we spend so much time in our minds. And I can’t help but think that this is also why my hearing has become as acute as my peripheral vision though my eardrums have surely degraded too. I can hear the squeak of a wheel approaching from the far end of the corridor. Every day at exactly the same time. You-the-Living are such creatures of habit. This is why the Polar Bear enclosure at the zoo makes such a good hunting blind: back in the day when the zoo was full of animals, thousands of tourists would come to gawk, eventually ending up before the Polar Bear “habitat,” as we called it, a word I now find rich with irony (a word from late Middle English via Old French from Latin habitabilis, from habitare: “possess, inhabit”).

On hot days, the crowds of ice-cream licking, balloon-holding kids, photo-snapping dads, hand-holding couples, and screaming babies, would be so dense—sometimes eight deep—that the zoo had erected a three-tier observation deck in front of the habitat. The top tier afforded an overview from on high, the pool below painted blue to make water out of a hydrant look like ocean; its concrete walls were curvy, like wind-sculpted snow banks, and glazed like them, too. The top tier shaded visitors on the ground-level where stairs led down into a viewing area below water level—like a cave—so the bear could be observed through a plate-glass window, like a big white and furry fish in an aquarium.

Today, the handicap ramp that leads to the top tier makes it possible for a zombie like me to get up there, and lie in wait—said the spider to the fly—just above the viewing area where most zoo visitors would congregate, leaning over the guardrail to get a closer look at the bears “frolicking” on their “ice-floes,” and diving into the water to hunt “seals,” i.e., bobbing, aluminum, beer kegs, provided by the zoo to give them something to do. “Enrichment,” they called it. Isn’t that rich?

Even still, there’s something primal in us that makes us want to see wild animals up close. When a human shows up, they can’t help but walk to the railing and gaze down into the habitat with its drained pool, its moat, now overrun by weeds. The sight does fill one with mal du pays, I must admit, a homesickness or melancholy for what’s over, the way the ruins of a castle, or the ruin-porn of an abandoned shopping mall, can send your thoughts back to days of yore….

It’s at this moment, when their guard is down, that I pounce.

Or rather, I roll. For you see, zombies can’t pounce. Or say rather, I do pounce. I mean, I call it pouncing, but the musculature just isn’t there. I can shift my eyes as fast as one of those Felix-the-Cat clocks, even turn my head, with effort. My mind is still active, so when it tells my body to “pounce,” I pounce. But is a “pounce” in slo-mo still a pounce? More literally, I lie in hiding on the top of the observation deck, and when my victim is directly below, absorbed in the melancholy of gazing into the overgrown habitat, I roll off the top ledge onto them. The result is the same.

The squeaking of the wheel drew near—a shopping cart, I imagined—full of its owner’s worldly possessions. So many post-apocalyptic movies played upon the cliché that to survive you had to gather all your stuff into a shopping cart and push it across the country that it became part of zombie lore. Don’t ask me why—two seconds of thought would show how stupid this is—maybe the idea’s an unconscious longing for the time when eating involved a stroll down the aisles of the Great Cornucopia of an American Supermarket, I don’t know—but it lightened my heart whenever I heard the squeak-and-rattle of an approaching shopping cart for it meant that its owner had learned to survive from movies and video games.

Just before this one entered my field of vision, the squeaking stopped. I held my breath (as they put it in novels). The human was thinking: weighing whether or not it was safe to walk into the Polar Bear viewing area. I made myself soundless.

Then there he was!—right below!—he was wearing a Green Bay Packer’s jersey—“RODGERS” emblazoned across the shoulders—and on his head was one of those ridiculous, yellow, foam-rubber wedges of cheese that Packer fans wore to football games. Packer fans used to like to repeat the story of the Cheese Head (as they called themselves) who was piloting a small plane home after a game when its engine conked out and he had to crash-land in a cow pasture. He survived because his head had been protected by the foam-rubber cheese wedge he’d been wearing, and, no doubt, this one thought his rubber hat would save him, too. Predictably, he was carrying a hunting rifle.

Predictably, he leaned his rifle against the wall, put his hands on the railing, leaned over, and let out a long, melancholic sigh.

I “pounced.”

I know what you want from me. You want gory details like in the movies: the screams, the spurts of blood, the twitching death-throes, the muscle spasms and victim’s eyes rolling back into his head—the red, gurgling gush of bloody foam from the mouth as he or she bites his or her tongue in half. But I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to give in to your prurient desires.

At least not yet.

The next one was a petite, bird of a man. A nervous type. A librarian, maybe, used to shushing people.

He must have felt that creepy sensation that You-Humans sometimes get when someone is watching you from behind—a feeling I had felt many times when alone in the stacks of a library late at night. Just before I landed on top of him, he turned and screamed: “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

I like to think that the first thing he saw was not me but the nametag on the lanyard I wear around my neck: “Hello. My Name Is: ARGGGGHHH!!!!” One of the speech therapists had been kind enough to use a magic marker to scrawl “ARGH!” where my name was supposed to go after I’d lost the power to say it coherently but was still able to share with her a sense of gallows humor.

He died like all the rest.

In this, You are all the same.

It’s not that I’m smarter than You-the-Living, though it’s hard to not come to that conclusion. It’s just that I’m better read. No, strike the “just” part. That’s the way someone with an advanced degree in accountancy, dentistry, IT solutions, or some other practical training—training, mind you, not education—used to put it to us English majors. I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard this joke: Majoring in business prepares students to ask, “How much does it cost?” An engineering degree prepares graduates to ask, “How does it work?” A pre-med major prepares graduates to ask, “Where does it hurt?” And majoring in English Literature prepares graduates to ask, “Do you want fries with that?”

Ha. (Pause a beat.)

Ha.

Who has the last laugh now? I mean, who ever thought reading The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde would be so practical? Every time I bite into one of those business or IT basket-weaving types I think, “Yes, I’d love some fries with that!”

But of course we don’t actually eat them, I hope you understand. And we certainly don’t eat brains. That’s just stupid. As stupid as saying vaginas eat penises because that’s how HIV spreads—why aren’t there any good words for this?—there’s lots of ways to become a zombie—it can happen as fast as a finger snap, or drag out over years—it’s just that the brain is the most direct vector and so the preferred site of contamination. The spine, if it wasn’t so hard to get at, would be better.

It’s not like zombies can’t die either, as Dr. Frankenstein’s creature thought. We “die.” That is, we die the way a virus dies. That is, we don’t really die because we’re not really alive: it’s more like when astronomers first found organic compounds on Mars, and everyone got excited and started asking, “Did you find life on Mars?” And the astronomers had to rain on the life-on-Mars parade by answering, “Well, not really, because technically, it doesn’t match the definition of life.” Same with us: Zombies don’t grow; we don’t reproduce by mating. Instead, we reproduce by spreading through a new host’s nervous system, like rabies. Otherwise, we’re just there. Dormant. And that ain’t life, according to the definition. You’ve heard of the mummy’s curse?—not actually a curse at all. There have been viruses inside Egyptian mummies that were still viable thousands of years after the mummy had been entombed. It’s just biology. Too much heat or light, or natural decay—lots of things can make a zombie non-viable—though not being able to get around makes it hard to infect others. So in that sense, we’re “dead.” Blowing the head off, like they do in the movies, doesn’t really “kill” the zombie. It just makes it impossible for him or her to get around, just like a vaccine doesn’t “kill” a virus—the tiniest version of us undead—it just disables the cells that have been infected, keeping them from infecting all the other cells in your body.

If you went over to a headless Zombie and started eating it, you’d become one, too. But you whose heads are chock full of cultural garbage don’t know about actual biology; it’s what makes you so easy to fool with placebos like those toilet-seat covers in the restrooms at airports. Or all the “pandemic theater” that businesses engage in every time there’s a new wave, installing hand-soap dispensers at concerts, or taking temperatures at amusement parks and all the other ruses they use to convince customers to come in and spend even if it’s the very air that kills.

The point is, while You-the-Living were feeding your brains on trash, I was consuming trash and the “best that has been thought and said” (I don’t expect you who read zombie stories to get the reference). Your minds are virtual encyclopedias of misinformation, stereotypes, clichés: Columbus discovered America, Zombies are slow moving (not always, see “pouncing” above); the bite of a Zombie turns the bitten into a Zombie (incomplete; you can get it just as easily by having sex with a Zombie (don’t be so naïve to think it doesn’t happen!)). Mostly, Zombies are non-human: a truism that at best depends on a very conservative definition of “human,” and here’s where literature can shed some light in a way that no other discipline can. Think of Pip, pitched into the sea like a traveler’s trunk in Moby-Dick, no easier to spot than a cork bobbing in waves that stretched to the horizon in all directions. Swimming is easy, Herman writes, but… “The intense concentration of the lone self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?”

Many have tried, q.v. Island Lit: The Tempest, of course. But lots of others, too: Robinson Crusoe; The Island of Doctor Moreau; The Vanishing; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Wittgenstein’s Mistress; The Wall; Foe….

Pip, an island of one.

When it comes to zombies and islands, Dr. Moreau is obvious, but let me explain Crusoe: Crusoe’s a zombie because he’s alone—his aloneness comes from being the last person on earth—he’s not, of course, but he’s got no one to talk to. Well, he does, but his singular companion is a parrot with less brains than a chatbot but more than the echo in a cave. Then Friday shows up, but for me, that’s where the novel ends. By which I mean, I’ve often wondered, “Am I different from them? Or are all of us zombies thinking exactly the same thing—each of us carbon copies of belief in our own uniqueness—trapped in our bodies, every effort to articulate thought coming out as ‘ArrrGGGGhhhhh!’” Or maybe we are more like ants in the way that they say there is no such thing as a singular one? Hard to say. Hard to imagine the life of the undead. Or the living. Those who map creaturely islands have long known how every crawling, creeping, flying, swimming, or electronic being lives in its own universe, the gap between it and the others so wide that any bridge is at best a pier: the snake, so attuned to the vibrations of the earth knows nothing of the world of color inhabited by the hummingbird, which is deaf to the rustles and whispers that make up the world of the owl, which knows nothing of a world of smells inhabited by creatures whose every pore is a nose and for whom the skies of every other creature, like stars to bats, is a black void.

This is why they say we’ll never find life on another planet, or inside a computer because all we ever do is look for ourselves, ignoring the fact that if we were bats, we would be searching the night sky for echoes, and finding none, declare the universe empty though it be full of stars. So it is with a zombie in a zombie body, with a zombie’s sensory world, which you have such a hard time imagining. But in this, a zombie such as myself is not so different from you, maybe more exaggerated, but if you’ve read Wittgenstein’s Mistress, you’ll see it’s a difference in degree, not kind.

In that novel, the narrator keeps telling readers that she’s the last person on earth as she roams about, burning paintings in the Louvre to keep warm, or even better, burning down the whole Louvre as she leaves, knowing she’ll never be back—so who cares?—if a Louvre burns in the forest and there’s no one there to…

So she travels the world, burning her bridges, so to speak, thinking about what it’s like to be the only person on earth, and it turns out she truly is alone in the world because she, like all of the living, can no more know an other than a marble in a jar can know the other marbles, but she, unlike most of us, understands this so deeply that she falls into despair. Sitting in the Bat House, I’ve often thought how that novel about the last woman on earth could have been written by a zombie. Or really any of us. Each and every one of us: the last person on earth. And the first. The only. Or at least the only one we can know.

I suspect that there’s a lot of self-loathing among zombies, as you might have guessed by now. But don’t take my word for it, just read Frankenstein, whose eponymous creature has always seemed like Crusoe’s better twin: Crusoe, constantly weighing the worth of everything and everyone, is the true monster, while the soliloquies Shelley puts in the mouth of Victor’s creature are the most eloquent parts of the book, especially his soliloquies on being denied his humanity: a Monster’s version of Shylock’s “Do we not bleed” speech. One could make the argument that if there is such a thing as a human, Shelley’s “monster” is it: he’s far more humane than the doctor who brings him into life and then spends the rest of the novel trying to abandon his creation on what can be the loneliest island of all, the solitary self. Victor’s creature is far more human than Victor’s fiancée, who wants to marry a doctor so she can get on with her bourgeois existence, worrying about who to seat next to whom at dinner parties, and trying to procreate in the old-fashioned way of the ancien régime… The Frankenstein “monster” (even the Boris Karloff adaptation) is far more humane than the peasants who drive him to suicide—a suicide that he knows can only be won through an extraordinary feat of will, mind you. In this, he is Don Quixote, judged mad by society because of his impossible dream: to treat even people at the bottom of society with dignity. Except, not being biologically “alive,” he’s finding it really hard to die. He’s on fire for human intercourse, but being alone on his island, there’s no way to get satisfaction. The difference from Crusoe lies in the fact that the Creature’s solitude is lived in a sea of humanity that parts before him with every step. “Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink,” as shipwreck survivors at sea used to say. I mean, the guy’s starved for conversation! Safe to say, Frankenstein’s Creature didn’t get the creator he deserved. But then again, who does?