Zombie Apocalypse Now

As soon as it became apparent that the Covid virus posed a problem and we were advised to “shelter in place” – my neighbor boarded up his tattoo shop. First, he boarded up his display windows, fitting the ply-board tight against the sidewalk below the windows. The next day he boarded up his front doors, the boarding again reaching tight against the pavement so that no crowbar could be wedged underneath to pry the boards loose. Finally, he even closed off his mail slots, making the front of his building one big impregnable barricade.

When we asked him what he was doing, a sort of gleam came into his eyes, like the gleam of sly triumph that illuminates someone who feels himself to be in possession of secret knowledge. The young man didn’t fully divulge his purposes, but intimated that this virus might signal “The Coming.” The coming of what – the apocalypse, end times, hordes of the kind of disease-crazed cannibals who populated Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?

Oh dear. And here I had thought the young man was a sane, sound artist, etching beautiful rose tattoos onto his customers’ arms. I thought of a lunch I’d had with a 90-year-old friend of mine – just before the virus hit. As we were finishing off our plates of pasta at the Olive Garden, we had drifted into some darker conversational waters – the war-torn Europe she’d known as a child, the cruelty of her first few years in America when her classmates had chanted “DP, DP, ain’t even got a place to pee” at her. Thinking back on what had been her general experience of life, she leaned over the remnants of our salad bowl and ominously whispered to me, “People are insane. I don’t mean some people. I mean all people.”

I tried to make a joke of it. I quoted that clichéd observation, “Everyone is crazy except you and me – and sometimes I wonder about you.” I laughed, hoping my laughter would put a lightening spin on my friend’s earnest take on life. But she didn’t laugh in return. Her seriousness chilled me. I privately knew that my own experience of life, even in the seeming smiling security of my lifelong Chicago neighborhood, had brought me to much the same conclusion. When I scratched the surface of people who appeared in passing to be upright, grounded individuals, I’d found all too often that they harbored a dangerous crookedness in their thinking.

Was my neighbor another illustration of that absolute my friend had claimed – all insane? Did that cheerful fellow who so helpfully collected my packages from UPS when I wasn’t home, really expect an assault from the resurrected dead?

Or should he be so readily dismissed? He eventually painted the ply-board he’d hammered in place, making an attractive façade of his hoarding. But for a week or so, the bare panels made the street truly look like something out of a post-nuclear holocaust movie. There was his board-up on one side of me, an overgrown lot on the other side of me, and abandoned storefronts scattered along much of the rest of the way. And then, the final apocalyptic touch was added to the scene late one night.

I was walking across the street in the A.M. – going to return a movie at the neighborhood Redbox. When I got in front of my neighbor’s forbidding new blankness, I saw a figure coming towards me. It was a shockingly thin man, dressed in shabby, threadbare work clothes. He was wearing a standard Covid mask. But his eyes, visible above the mask, were sunken, red-rimmed. He lurched towards me, stopping just inches in front of my face, hardly observing the 6-foot distancing. He spoke. “Where Troy?” he demanded. “You know Troy? Where, where Troy?” his demand turned into a strange, pleading in broken English.

I went almost numb with the oddness of this approach. Troy? I searched my brain. With complete irrelevance, the only Troy that came to my mind was Troy Donahue, the popular actor from the 60’s. I was about to tell the man that I was sorry, but that I thought Troy Donahue had died some years before. But then it hit me. Of course! Troy was the next street east. I’d lived in this same place since I was a child, with Troy Street being adjacent the whole time. So why had my mind jumped to the obscurity of Troy Donahue? In my defense, the reason might have been the way the man had worded his question. When he’d asked, “You know Troy?” it sounded as if he was referring to a person.

Still, it was a sign of the whole weird incongruity of the scene that my mind had jumped to Troy Donahue rather than to the obvious. I had made a comic, hysteric leap to an absurd association. I straightened up and told the man that Troy Street was the next street over. I crooked my finger, pointing east.

The man thanked me, jerked a nod, and shambled off into what was – of course – a gathering mist. He rounded the corner and was gone.

Who was that masked man? Or what was he? Was it possible that my neighbor hadn’t been veering into the crazies after all by boarding up his building, expecting marauding gangs of the undead? Had his precautions been all too prescient? Was he perhaps the exception, the one sane person whose existence both my friend and I had denied? Had I just seen the start of what my neighbor had correctly anticipated – a Zombie Apocalypse – now?