Zombies: More Recent Dead

Pollution Don Webb

Billy Parsons had never seen an American kyonshi. He had been living in Nagoya for four months as an English teacher. It was an unsteady job, employment mavens were predicting English would soon be on the way out replaced by the winner’s language in the Chinese-Brazilian War. Billy didn’t care, he was a Nippophile of the first water. He was living in Japan, damn it, Japan, and every step was a movement toward some Rising Sun moment. Every sushi roll, every cup of matcha, every recording of a mournful samisen brought him that much closer to what he wanted to be.

The kyonshi (Billy would never use the cruder term zombi) pushed a broom down the school’s corridor. The winking lights of his headgear were as Japanese as could be. Billy knew his school had money, but a job like this was commonly done by a roboto. Billy pulled out a phone and snapped a picture. All of his friends back in Patterson would be jealous. He wondered from whom the school had bought the kyonshi. In life, he would have been middle-aged. His white skin was tanned and leathery and disfigured with several hairy moles, the robotic eyes had been made to look blue. The shambling figure reminded him of a businessman, partly because he was dressed in a pinstriped Western business suit (albeit of a much stronger/thicker fabric) and partially because it resembled Billy’s dad. A kyonshi! A real live kyonshi! Well maybe “live” is not the best choice of terms. Billy was something of a klutz in the sciences. He thought of the zombies as undead. Something his mom would have liked like vampire novels or Hip-Hop. He remembered his great disappointment when Mom had given him the George Romero film collection for his thirteenth birthday. “You’re a boy aren’t you? Boys love zombies!” she had said. Billy did not understand that his lack of love for American horror might indicate a taste for other boys in his mom’s eyes. She was so relieved later when she found his collection manga focused on tentacle rape. Thank Jesus he’s normal.

Billy’s dad had passed last year. Weeks of sitting in the hospital in Patterson, watching the nurses stripping the brown clotted blood from the drainage tubes on his chest, smelling the fake pine forest smell of the air freshener, listening to the old man lapse into diatribes against the government’s failure to prevent Texan secession, hate-filled rants against his mother adultery, tasteless jokes about the Great Wall of Canada. Billy had felt so glad and so guilty that day Dad had tried to stand without warning and began the pouring out of the last of his tired and toxic blood. As the dangerous chemical splashed on the tiles, Billy thought of the red rays of the Rising Sun. His dreams had come true at last, as his family conveniently left the stage. It was a great and Shakespearean moment. Of course had lived anywhere else—any civilized place—even Texas, he could have sold Dad’s dying body to the zombie makers. He could have left that day for his spiritual homeland and lived like the Mikado. Seeing the kyonshi was a sign—his father’s ghost had joined him in Japan. All was well. All was good. Everything was tending toward its kami state.

The class bell broke this anti-Hamlet reverie, and he hurried to his class to teach English to students who were doing what their parents had done for six generations since Pearl Harbor, learning the language of power. Today’s lesson: an infinitive can be used just like a noun in all cases save for the possessive. To err is human. Mr. Parsons loves to read.

Three hours later Billy knelt on his tatami mats practicing sitting Zen. His computer screen simulated the meditation master. His randomly selected koan: “Hogen pointed to the bamboo blinds with his hand. At that moment, two monks who were there went over to the blinds and rolled them up. Hogen said, ‘One has gained, one has lost.’ ” Billy had no idea what that meant, but it was so damn Japanese! He focused his mind attentively on the koan, and attended to his breath. Fifteen minutes later he began to nod off, and as his head bent toward the floor, the computer made a booming noise awakening him. His neighbors pounded his wall and yelled in Japanese. Billy did not know if he were closer to enlightenment. He would have to buy better software to detect that, and such modern (or was it postmodern) touches seemed to Billy to be cheating. Enlightenment should come the old fashioned way.

Later he updated his status on the social networks. His old friends in the Patterson Ottaku Club were suitably impressed. Nothing said Japan more than a kyonshi.

Four bestselling manga were devoted to kyonshi: Kyonshi Love, Reverend Deadman, Kyonshi Girl, and Air Raid Siren. Kyonshi Love featured Katsumi, who intentionally exposed himself to the virus so that he could track his childhood sweetheart Kasumi—it was a retelling of the Robert Silverberg novella “Born with the Dead.” Reverend Deadman was a zombie Lutheran minister that had broken free from his controller and ran a church in Tokyo by day and fought alien sex fiends by night. His “undead” status gave him limitless energy and immunity from the aliens’ sex rays. Kyonshi Girl was a schoolgirl, who despite the fact her family had sold her as a kyonshi, sought the love of a demon prince and kept losing her underwear in interesting and creative ways. Air Raid Siren paid homage to a popular conspiracy theory that the virus was not man-made at all but had appeared at the Hiroshima blast. Billy loved them all. Of course they had nothing to do with the actual biology and economics of kyonshis.

When Billy was in high school, Dr. Kenta Sasaki developed the “zombie virus.” He had been working with artificial viruses that slow down and stabilize human metabolic functions. His initial work drew from the same reasoning as Western cryonics. If you give a terminal patient a few more years, a cure might be found. Dr. Sasaki’s own brother had died a few years before the AIDS cure. The virus stabilized tissue, but like other filoviruses—say, Ebola and Marburg—it showed a great affinity for the cells of the brain, eyes, and reproductive organs. Dr. Sasaki had been very careful in his design, the zombie virus did not share its sisters’ ability to infect rapidly. In fact the virus only infected one in ten people it was tried on in the best of circumstances. It was easy to cure, that is eliminate from the system—but the damage it did (especially to the brain) proved irreversible.

Some wealthy people underwent the infection as their only hope. Maybe their rare cancer, maybe their unidentifiable disease would be cured, and a cure found for the zombie virus. Their shambling state, their pale skin might be ended in some happy future. But given their looks and the years of zombie mythology in popular culture—they were seen as grade-A George Romero living dead. Although their tasteless food was made by baby food manufacturers, any number of brain-eating jokes came into being in the early years.

Soon there were rest homes in Japan, Canada, Dubai, and Italy full of the blind mindless ex-humans that seemed happy to live forever—as long as they didn’t wander in front of a speeding car and or disappear into an open elevator shaft. There were human rights debates, tired old clichés about the dignity of human life were traded by both sides. Then Capeksen, a Japanese robotics firm, came up with a solution. Scoop out the eyes and upper brain and put in a few dedicated microprocessors to care of things. The robotic eyes saw and looked better than blackened pustules. The computers used the remaining nervous system to move the “dead” man around. Suddenly the zombies could care for themselves. They could shower, they could fix food, they seemed more human.

At first no one had thought of them as slaves.

The next day Billy wanted to shoot a film of the kyonshi washing toilets in his school. He remained after class. The kyonshi paid no heed him as he knelt in front of each toilet and washed it clean. Billy thought this guy would get more out of Zen training than he was. He squirted some blue fluid into each bowl, methodically swished its white porcelain interior then flushed. Billy had shot him processing three bowls in a row and was about to leave when the kyonshi tripped on a small pencil stub dropped by a careless student. It pitched forward and dunked its head into the water. Billy winced at the cracking sound of the control unit hitting the bowl, and thought of getting swirlies in the eight grade. Emergency programs went into play and it pulled itself out. The crown-like controller on its head blinked on and off and on and off. The zombie sat with its back against the stall. It looked at Billy and said in toneless Japanese, “An accident has occurred. Please call a Capeksen technician. An accident has occurred, please call a Capeksen technician. Thank you for your aid in maintaining this expensive Kyonshi Mark IV.” The kyonshi cradled its head in its pale hands like a human with a bad headache. All of the lights went out. Billy’s instinctive programing as a human being took over, and forgetting that he was watching a zombie ran to what seemed to be a dying man. The kyonshi breathed slowly and evenly. It must be in some sort of sleep mode, thought Billy. He ran to the headmaster’s office.

Since Billy had reported the problem (with typical Japanese management style) it became his to oversee. As he waited in the restroom for the technician to arrive, Billy became an average American for a few minutes—underpaid, working in a humiliating environment, hating his boss. He was his father’s son for perhaps for the last time. He needed to comfort the zombie. It was like taking care of Dad after Mom left in his ninth-grade year. At least there was no vomit to clean up. Billy got a few stiff brown paper towels and dried the toilet water off of his suit. He pulled the zombie from the stall and laid it out on the green and brown tiles of the restroom. He was making a little pillow for it out of copies of To Kill a Mockingbird from his class. As he waited for the technician, he kept telling the kyonshi it would be all right, and cussing his asshole boss for making him wait in an unheated restroom. He was patting the cold brow of the kyonshi, when the restroom door swung open.

“Please stand away from the Kyonshi Mark IV,” said the white-coated technician.

It was an awkward moment. The technician lived in the the apartment next to his. This man or his wife had pounded on Billy’s wall many times when his Zazen program would loudly awaken him.

“I tried to make him comfortable,” said Billy.

“The Kyonshi Mark IV has no software appreciating comfort. Please explain the accident to me.”

The technician showed no signs of recognition, but how many six-foot-eight chubby red-haired Irish-Americans lived in Nagoya? From the small high windows, Billy saw that night had fallen. He had probably pulled this poor man from his apartment—once again disturbing his night.

Watching the man work on the fallen zombie looked like that robot repair scene from a dozen cheap movies. The technician popped the controller open and was removing a small box from behind the kyonshi’s right eye. He took a small unit from his belt, and connected it to the fallen zombie. He pushed buttons, the kyonshi sat up. More buttons, it stood up. The technician pushed more buttons, watched indicator lights and said, “I will have to take him home for repair. I will need you to sign him over to me.”

“Home?” said Billy, “Not to a factory or office?”

“I am the Capeksen representative of the area. Many people do not like having the kyonshi near them. But I live in an apartment full of Koreans and other foreign devils.”

Billy looked down. He had suddenly become Japanese again—not really Japanese of course, but the fantasy Japanese he had hoped to be. Billy Parsons felt loss of face. He bowed, and said quietly, “I am sorry to have disturbed the harmony of your home.”

The technician looked like he might laugh. Twice he started to speak, trying to find the right words, finally he spoke in English. “Mr. Parsons, you cannot understand, but you have given my wife and I someone we can yell at. It is a rare gift.”

Billy stared. The man was right. He didn’t understand. He looked at the bathroom floor again.

The technician said, “Would you like a ride to our home? I have brought my van, and I will have room for your bicycle as well, my friend.”

The technician had installed a device with longer cables by the time Billy brought his bike around. He walked the kyonshi to the van and stepped him in.

Conversation was limited on the way home. Eventually Billy managed to get the technician to talk about the mechanized puppets that Nagoya was famous for. Robotics had started here long before the West had dreamed of such toys. Billy asked if the technician’s family had made the puppets. The technician grimaced and said that his family had been butchers and leather workers. Then the man had laughed as though Billy was the funniest foreign devil of all time.

Billy learned that Capeksen did have a factory here. In fact most of the newly infected were shipped to that factory. The technician was a sort of contractor—much as Billy’s grandfather had installed cable TV. Billy guessed the job didn’t pay much. When the van had been finally been parked, Billy asked, “Please forgive this one’s ignorance of Japanese culture, but why did you say that it is rare you and your wife can yell at anyone?”

The technician looked at him and said, “Burakumin.” and shrugged. Billy had no idea what he was talking about, so he bowed. The technician laughed again.

When he got to his apartment he asked his phone what Burakumin meant. It said, “Village people.” He asked his phone to show him “village people,” and it showed him a photo of an American disco music group from his grandmother’s time. The technician did not look like the cop, the construction worker, or the Indian chief.

He nuked some yakitori, and when it was time to run his zazen program he turned off the “Awakening” feature. His koan for the night was, “A student asked Joshu, ‘If I haven’t anything in my mind, what shall I do?’ Joshu replied: ‘Throw it out.’ ‘If I haven’t anything, how can I throw it out?’ continued the questioner. ‘Well,’ said Joshu, ‘then carry it out.’ ”

He nodded off and woke about 8:00 to call Suzi. Suzi had been his Japanese girlfriend. All nippophiles get a Japanese girlfriend. It comes with the small apartment and the visit to fertility shrines. Suzi had ended his dreams about being Japanese. They had dated for three months. One day he had mentioned his hope of marriage. “I cannot marry you.” she said, “My family would never speak to me. They want to me marry a Japanese man.”

“But I want to live here all of my life.” said Billy, “I want to be Japanese.”

“If you want to be Japanese, die and be reborn as a Japanese. I date you because you are a foreigner. Last week you told me you loved me. My Japanese boyfriends never say that. You are the same thing for me that I am for you. A fantasy of not being myself.”

Billy did not speak to her for a week. When he started talking to her again, it was as a friend, which was his first woman who was a friend. She found another foreigner to date.

“Suzi, what is a Burakumin?”

“Have you been talking to old people?”

“No, my neighbor said it. I think it means ‘village person.’ ”

“It does mean ‘village person.’ That’s the literal meaning, but it is really a derogatory term—like some Americans calling Arabs ‘towel heads.’ In the old days some trades were considered polluted—butchers, leather workers, people who wash corpses, some sexual entertainers. They are separate like a caste. Pollution beliefs are very strong in Shinto.”

“But they are Japanese, aren’t they? He looks Japanese.”

“Of course he looks Japanese, he is Japanese by DNA. It’s a taboo—your neighbor will make less money, live in bad places, marry into his own kind. The notion of pollution runs deep. Companies used to keep illegal lists of the Burakumin. In the beginning of this century they were almost mainstreamed. Then when kyonshi technology showed up, they were the only ones who could risk the pollution. You aren’t Japanese, you wouldn’t understand.”

Billy remembered his dad railing against the Italians and the Poles. His mom’s maiden name was Polish. Dad explained to him many drunken times, that Mom looked white but . . .

He knew about the human need to hate. His body was full of memories. When he was a geeky teenager obsessed with Japanese pop culture, he was hated. He was marked. In sixth grade two junior high boys beat him yelling that he should have learned karate from his comic books. In seventh grade he was tossed headfirst into the girl’s bathroom. The impact with the door actually knocked him out, so he arrived unconscious. When he came to in the nurse’s office, the principal sent him home because of his behavior. He had to come the next day with his parents to be reinstated. That led to his Dad’s first burning of his manga. Later that year at Halloween he had engaged in cosplay—he was the evilest “hero” of them all: Lelouch Lamperouge. Everyone made fun of him, the dark and interesting antihero of Code Geass was called a “Fag Vampire.” Some kids caught him in a park. He called his parents and his drunk dad drove up in his small tan Toyota pickup. It began all heroic-like. Dad drove into the park, across the football field toward the white bandstand. The Hulks, the Spider-men, the one Wonder Woman fled from his dad’s headlights. Billy ran to Dad. Dad got out of the truck and picked him like a trash-bag and threw him in the back of the truck. Billy heard a rib crack when he landed.

But he stood his ground, he watched anime on his computer, and kept his manga under his bed, took Japanese in high school. He swore a samurai oath to help the downtrodden, yet by his senior year he was making fun of the childish tastes of the new members of the Patterson Ottaku Club. “You like Sinji? And you’re potty-trained?” He taunted kids that liked G-force or (Buddha help them!) Speed Racer.

In college he passed his larva stage as a worm-like ottaku and gained the wings of a true Nippophile. He learned Japanese literature, studied Zen, wrote haiku. He majored in English because English teachers can always get crummy apartments. Who cares how bad your apartment is if you can see Nagoya Castle? Of course he had first seen it in Godzilla vs. Mothra or had it been Gamera vs. Gaos?

No one had saved him, no human had reached out to him, so he choose reading over life, the fantasy of Japan over the reality of Patterson.

Tomorrow he would reach out to his neighbor. He would bridge the gap that surrounded the kyonshi workers. His own quest to be Japanese was nothing compared to the Burakumin. He surfed the web into the night learning the history of the kyonshi.

After Capeksen designed the controllers, a major scandal shook the industry. The promise was that somehow cures would come for the wealthy dead. The controlling units enabled them to live with some measure of dignity—which they did when their families visited. But the zombies also worked well as lawn mowers, gardeners, car washers, and—for some people with a taste for geriatric porn—they became sex slaves. An unscheduled visit by a reporter ended the appeal. No one wanted their grandmother blowing programmers who couldn’t get laid otherwise. It did not matter that new safeguards could eliminate this semi-sentient slavery; stock in Capeksen fell like Lucifer from heaven.

It took murder to change the fate of Capeksen again. When the Toronto cannibal, Robert “Taco Time” LeBlanc’s infamous Mexi-Cali Grill had been less than careful with the meat grinder and the mangled diamond wedding ring of Mary Casutto wound up in a food critic’s mouth, a new “crime of the century” dominated the newsfeeds for months. Who can forget the angry, crying Robert Casutto begging the white-wigged judge to sentence LeBlanc to zombie status? Owning a slave became a statement that one stood for Justice, Liberty, and the Canadian way. Humanity’s age-old fascination with slavery re-manifested. At first, zombiehood was reserved for the worst offenders. But the status symbol of owning a (former) human being as a slave began filling the newsfeeds. Every star, every pop singer had a zombie in tow. The Electric Luddites had an entire zombie road crew with their neon orange logo tattooed on their pasty faces.

Soon there weren’t enough criminals to meet the demand. But people still died. What if you elected to be infected? What if you could pay off your huge hospital bills, end debts, put grandchildren through college? Humans have always made greet sacrifices for their families. The peace of mind that came by selling your body into thralldom was immense. Poor families dreading the cost of Granddad’s funeral now had a marketable resource. It was a great deal: the living would collect a huge fee for their loved one’s attempt to become infected. Ninety percent of the time, the infection didn’t occur. For the ten percent who made the transition, it meant no more pain (at least this was what was believed), and even more money. The sale of one walking zombie paid more than most average humans made in a year. Japan led the world in kyonshi manufacture. Very few countries opposed the zombies. The Islamic world held out, as did the United States (which had always been based on flesh-worship). From an American point of view, zombies were as bad as abortion, euthanasia, and stem-cell research.

Billy biked to school the next morning. There was a hint of frost in the air, but warmth in his heart. This was the day he would become a man. He would undo the bullying that had haunted his childhood. This was his day to pay Japan back.

When the technician arrived with the kyonshi following along, Billy almost ran from his class to meet him. The technician regarded him dully. Billy offered to take him to lunch. With obvious regret the technician accepted.

It was awful. Over the sweet chicken wings Billy ran through every cliché that American public education had given him about diversity, the brotherhood of mankind, the humanness of us all. The technician nodded absently. Billy began to get it. The man did not want Billy’s approval or acceptance. If he had wanted the acceptance of foreigners he could have moved to the United States or Brazil. He wanted to be Japanese. His father’s generation had seen the prejudice against the Burakumin almost vanish. But Billy couldn’t reach out to the technician any more than a white child could have to his black friend in the American South in the bad old days. No one is welcomed by someone who stoops to shake his hand. Toward the end of the meal, as each was eating his red bean jelly tofu ice cream, Billy tried talking about the kyonshi.

“Do you think they remember their former lives?”

“The upper sections of their brains are gone. I doubt they remember anything.”

“But they could remember.”

“Perhaps. That is why my family is hated. Imagine if you were trapping the soul of someone’s relative for generations—kyonshi have great vitality. Once the virus is in place, the body has immunity to almost all diseases. Even if the kyonshi has a cut, it does not become infected. With care, their useful work-span could be sixty or seventy years.”

“The kyonshi at my school. I assume he was American?”

“I would have no idea. Did you guess he was American because all of you people look alike?” The technician smiled at his own joke.

“Who sold his body?” Billy asked.

“He may have been dying without heirs. Sometimes a foreigner passes away, and the state steps in to administer the virus before he or she dies. If heirs show up later the kyonshi passes to them.”

Lunch ended. Billy went back to school. For some weeks he would greet the technician or his wife in the hallway. Then he learned to look away. He bought a new zazen program that administered electric shocks when the novice nodded off. He briefly dated a Japanese-American woman. Spring came. Cherry trees blossomed. Billy wandered slowly through his life in love with all he saw, a cousin of Tantalus. He saw the world he wanted but could not touch it. More or less.

Then, without drama, he overslept a few minutes one day. He rushed to get ready, and slipped in the shower. He lay paralyzed with the warm water rushing over him. His overuse of water triggered an alarm system. The building superintendent found him, shut off the shower, and medical robotos took his pruney body to the hospital. There were shocks, and heart massage, and stimulants shot into his bloodstream. A Catholic priest read him his last rites. Billy could hear, but not move, not blink. He heard the saws biting into his skull.

Days, weeks, months later—he came to. His eyesight was much better. He saw the toilets he cleaned, the halls he swept, the walls he repainted every seven years. He saw his neighbor, who had strangely grown old. He felt nothing when his neighbor slapped him. Felt nothing when his neighbor spit upon him.

Thoughts slowly came back to him. He would see Nagoya Castle through the windows of the building he worked in. Nothing had changed for Billy Parsons. The world he wanted was still as remote. He still silently watched Japan. After sixty years of janitorial service, his bones wore too thin to be of use. At the behest of his programmers he walked to the crematorium. There was a flash of light and his soul passed beyond the bounds of this story.