"The Afternoon of the Living Dead," by Andrew Goodwin

ISN'T IT OVER YET? Surely it must be time for the bell. Don't panic just don't start  panicking or it'll feed on itself and then you're screwed. And don't forget the breath. How many times can you do that? I've only been here two days, no that's not right, it's still only the second day, Jesus Christ it's only been one night and there are six more to go. I'm cold and tired -- I hardly got any sleep because the birds woke me up at dawn. I can't stand too much more of this. Keep going and don't think about that stuff that shouldn't be thought about not that stuff keep that away at all costs don't think about that stuff that the thinking is now all about. Damn. An infinite number of forgotten moments, that's my whole sorry life. It must be forty minutes by now.  

I want to open my eyes to check the time but this morning Teacher told us off for looking at our watches and I think he meant me so I left mine behind in my little cell. The cell I share with the hippie guy, in his thirties I'd say, the little boy lost with the ginger beard, the Charlie Manson eyes and the smile that will not be chased away. Well, when we're done here and we can talk I'm going to tell him what the next decade has in store for him. That'll wipe the smirk off his face. I swallow and the sound echoes around my skull like Niagara Falls just had an orgasm. They must have heard that in Denver. Ring the bell why don't you? What are you, some kind of sadist?

Our Teacher is pudgy and bald, in his late fifties I'd say, not exactly holding the years well and hardly a walking advertisement for enlightenment. Asked to sum up his philosophy at the opening session yesterday afternoon, he droned on for about twenty minutes and then said it could all be boiled down to this: Things change, everything's impermanent. If you cling that's a problem. So we're not punished for our sins, he said, but by them. Why not both, I thought. This morning he told us about some ancient rock garden in Japan where they have fifteen rocks set out so that you can't see all of them from any one position. It's a silent retreat but we're allowed to ask questions after the talks and what I wanted to say was, about the rocks I mean, Well then, aren't some things more permanent than others?

Oh I remember now. Count the breath. Right. On the out-breath, I feel the air drifting down the hairs on my upper lip. Refreshing. One. This is easy! Boring, even. See? It isn't like someone's going to die. Oh dear. Think about that later. Last night, during his talk, our guru closed his eyes for a moment, pressed his hands together and went off on zombies. Well I've loved those old zombie movies since I was a little kid, so I paid attention and stopped thinking about whether I needed to get to the meditation hall early in the morning so that I could get a better spot. Zombies, yes I remember now, are inevitable. Inevitable! It was inevitable, he said, that human culture would conjure up the idea of zombies because once we made the mistake of thinking that we had a soul, the internal combustion engine of culture, that's what he called it, then it follows that . . .  what was it?

I forget. Jesus my back hurts. Maybe I should get up and leave. Just go home right now. But what would I say to Martha? No, I couldn't face that. Her contempt. You'll never last the week, Douglas. You? Silent for seven days? What a hoot! I'd have to stay in a motel for the week. But then if she found out? A credit card bill or the record of the cash taken from an ATM.  She'd think I'm having an affair. But I am having an affair. Better stay here then.  

OK, pull yourself together, it's walking meditation next and how hard can that be? Taking a lungful of air, I feel my chest rise and fall, pulling the oxygen in so sharply that my ribs ache, and the exhalation that follows, well that sounds like someone who is really pissed just let off steam, literally. I'm making enough of a racket here, what with the swallowing and the breathing, I could wake the dead. Count, you loser. One. Shit I did it on the in-breath.  And now I just missed the out-breath. What is up with this? Alright calm down don't panic it's just sitting and breathing you've been doing it your whole life, forty-nine years you've been at it, it isn't like you haven't had practice. One.  

Wake the dead? Could you do that? Julian, the head chef at my restaurant, his mom died recently and now he's much nicer to work with, he said last week that he's dreading Christmas. He said he wished you could wake the dead, just for a couple of days and have them come back to visit. Well if my parents ever get it together to actually die, they can both have a good long sleep. As far as naptime, I'll be letting them catch up, if you see what I mean. And then I could sell the restaurant, leave Martha and . . . do what exactly?  I see my wife's sneering face in pixels on the backs of my eyelids. But they're not really pixels, that's just a metaphor or whatever, and there's no real pattern to the "pixels." Thinking with quotes around the words, how modern. Anyway, he said, our teacher, I mean, that the internal combustion engine of culture is the idea that everyone has a soul and that this soul is the thing inside us that makes us tick. So once you make that mistake, thinking there's something invisible inside you that turns the crank shaft of consciousness, well then it's only a hop skip and a jump to . . . No, hold on, I'm supposed to be counting. Deep breath. One.  

Maybe the walking will be more fun. Like it could be any less fun than this. Torture, that's what this is. I should've gone back to that health spa down near La Jolla. So what if the women have a few too many pounds on them? At least they wear make-up. Nice part of the world, too, and pretty decent food. Down there they feed you eggs for breakfast. Will there be eggs here? Tomorrow morning? Don't start thinking about breakfast. A hard-boiled egg. Yummy. Coffee, eggs. Eggs and coffee. Don't think about breakfast you dipshit. Eggs with legs dancing on a cup, coffee drops raining on a poached egg, coffee flavored scrambled eggs. Yuck. Stop it, come back to the breath. One. Too many eggs; a heart attack, is that what I want?

If I just make it through to the end of this and then do the walking, it's dinner time. Dinner? Well if it's anything like last night I'd say that's stretching the term. Anyway, once we're fed the rotting vegan tofu stew or whatever the hell that was, then we're free. For two hours. Maybe I could skip out. Go to the movies, get a bite to eat. A hamburger! A BLT. So what if they torture the pigs, because that's what it is, I mean, in my line of work you can't avoid knowing some things you'd rather not know; but let's face it, the lower animals don't have enough neurons to suffer. They're robots. Growbots, well that's my term for vegetation, carrots, celery, mushrooms and stuff. Animals are Lowbots. And people? We're Knowbots, obviously. But pigs, chickens, cows and the like, they're just Lowbots and do they have souls? Of course they do not. Well, according to Teacher, nobody does. In-breath. Try to count you asshole! A BLT. A movie. A BLT followed by a movie. One. A BLT a movie a mocha and a nightcap. Would anybody notice? Would they stop me at the gate to the main road? Do they have guards in orange robes out there, holding the perimeter? Would they come after me? Or wait for my return and then impose some kind of punishment? You'll sit there and count until you get to two or there'll be hell to pay Mister! Not that I'm not paying already. Six hundred bucks! For this! Martha's right about one thing. I must be crazy.  

One. Oh jeez this is hopeless. Ring that bell you Son-of-a-Buddha! OK I'm giving up. I'm just gonna sit here and think. No one will know. Blessed relief oh happy day yes praise the Lord I'm just going to sit here and think whatever thoughts I feel like having and screw the lot of you. The zombies, yes, he said that once you start to believe that there's an homunculus inside you running the show, engineering the soul, then it's inevitable that people will begin to wonder what happens to the inner you when you're sleeping. Or sick. Or . . . dead. And if that little person is operating independently of your body then you'd better make damn sure it doesn't make a run for it, skipping out through the mouth for instance, or heading off on a jaunt, via the nostrils. Or have a spell cast on it, or go AWOL while you're dreaming and then not come back. Because if that happens, then what you're left with is, in a word, a zombie. A Fauxbot. Ha!  

Martha thinks I'm a zombie. A . . . what was it? Oh yeah, a robot on autopilot. I told her about this Growbot, Lowbot and Knowbot thing and she laughed but it wasn't a nice laugh and then she said, You've become a robot on autopilot, Douglas. She said this in bed, which didn't exactly help. Why don't you wake up and do something? Well, I'd been thinking about Geraldine. So I said, OK, fuck you you fucking bitch I'll go on a meditation retreat. Well, I'd be thinking about this for some time, ever since Julian started doing yoga and stuff, because they don't call you on retreat, they can't send you emails, it isn't like your wife can check up on you, not unless there's an emergency. If I can stick it out until Wednesday I can sneak to the car after lunch, call Geraldine, she'll be on her day off, see if she'd like me to come be mindful with her. In bed. Or wherever. In the car. The car! If it rains. No cover, you see. For cars. They expect you to tip the guru on top of the six hundred, and I've got to leave the Lexus to the mercy of the elements.  

Holy shit.  

The sound waves from the bell reverberate around the hall and it's like getting whacked in the gut by an angry customer. Like that skinny little English jerk who got wasted on J&B's and went nuts because Geraldine took a twenty back to the table and...  No, no time for backstory now I'm trying to be in the mo . . .  there's the second one. Boom! I can feel it in my bones. And there's another one coming but I'm ready for the third explosion. It's like a bomb went off in here, one of those sonor gizmos they used in Afghanistan or whatever, the ones that make you deaf. Skull crushers. Brain chewers. Nerve munchers. Lung shredders.

I open my eyes and get up gingerly. Head rush. One or two others are bolting for the door, yeah there goes the fat guy who's always late. What kind of a moron comes on retreat and never thinks about anyone else? The rest of them, about a dozen or so, they're stretching and bowing with exaggerated care and slowed-down pacing like they're singles playing at thirty-three and a third. My knees hurt more than my back now and I wobble out of the hall, feeling a bit embarrassed that I'm not bowing to the huge golden Buddha statue up front, but I can't do that, leave the bowing to the Asians I say, it's really not my thing, and anyway I'm in a hurry to get some air. I'm first out under the overcast sky and onto the patio outside the hall.  It's chilly. Best to get moving then.  

What were the instructions? Oh yeah, it's a meditation, so you have to try to be aware of the sensation of your foot hitting the ground, the movement of your muscles as you lift your foot, every feeling in your heel, your toes. How hard can it be? Harder than trying to concentrate on the taste of an organic raisin while avoiding the vacant gaze of the zombie sitting in front of you at lunch? What a crowd! Sitting there pretending like they're monks or something. Chewing on the cud. Everything's a meditation, Jesus you meditate on the crapper here; Teacher says we have to wake up, come into the moment. Well, what if you don't like the moment? What then? Yeah, I remember now, his little joke at the end. He said maybe we're all zombies, the living dead, because a zombie wouldn't know, right? That he was one.  

OK, here goes. Look about a foot in front of you, down at an angle, but don't focus, that's what he said. Lift the right foot. And watch out for that little gecko scurrying about, it's only a Lowbot but still not cool to tread on it, not in front of this crowd anyway. Do we have to walk slowly? I mean, just because I'm being mindful or whatever why does that mean I have to walk like a turtle? I don't know why I care it's just human nature I guess but now I'm worried in case I'm doing it too slowly. Or too fast. Better check it out.  

I look up to see the last stragglers drifting out of the hall, the blissed-out matron, the yuppie scum who looks like he's still behind schedule, the carefree young kid with the ponytail, and then I see a dozen others circling around me, staring into middle distance, nobody home, not a soul, and yes now here comes Teacher, unsmiling, moving like he's stoned, too, completely out to lunch. I'm surrounded by them, lurching about, arms dangling at their sides, all motion slowed down, yogis on Xanax they are, their gestures at this snail's pace, well, not quite human. They're walking circles around me, lumbering about with no life in their eyes, and I know oh yes I see things clearly now, that I'm going to be punished, punished for my sins; punished by them and punished for them.  

Andrew Goodwin teaches Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. He writes for Tricycle and Inquiring Mind. He recently completed his first novel, Enjoy The Silence.  
 

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