8

ZOMBIES EXPLAINED TO US

Dr. Rauf pulls at his sides as if looking for seat belts. He wiggles his hips in his chair, trying to fit his legs onto them. Eventually he settles. Grant pauses, scanning over Rauf’s cluttered pose, and phrases the question like this:

“Dr. Rauf, the explanations for this disease are very baffling, to say the least. It’s been said over and over again that this is not a physical disease or a mental one. And I suppose, while you’re here, we can clear the air totally. Is this a spiritual plague, as has recently been suggested? Clear that up for us now, could you doctor?”

Rauf rolls his upper lip under his nose, sealing his nostrils with the slick insides of his mouth.

“No. There’s no such thing. A very motivated speculation, indeed.”

Grant smiles. In fact, he is prepared to laugh if any answer turns out to be funny.

“OK. So we hear a lot about what this virus is not. And in fact, once we run through all the negatives, it appears that the thing doesn’t exist at all. So how is it that people are testing positive?”

“Well, one of the first things to understand about this virus is that its existence is incomprehensible because it exists contrary to the way our rational minds comprehend. And because the virus is situated, quite physically, anterior to the process of comprehension itself.”

Grant cannot hide his discomfort and his next question is impatient.

“OK. If you had to answer quickly, what would you say? Where is this virus?”

“Simple. It gestates in the deep structures prior to language. Or, at least, simultaneous with language. In the very primal structure that organizes us as differentiated, discontinuous copies of each other. The virus probably enters, in fact, among paradigmatic arrangements. And then, almost instantly, the virus appears in a concept of itself. This causes all sorts of havoc. A common effect being the sensation that the present moment is a copy of itself. It’s been misnamed déjà vu. Other early symptoms occur when the act of selecting a word becomes jammed. This process finds paradigms attempting to reinvent themselves as syntagma, and this manifests in the patient as fairly common aphasia. The person wants a fork but asks for a table or an oar or a knife. The next stages are more chaotic. As conditions within the personality become ultra-sensitive to their own construction, there is a kind of sped-up production of reality. This is a compensation for, or an escape from, the rending of their once invisible frames. Or horizons. Horizons that are quite literally looming. A frightening and painful type of madness ensues, and some of the incidents that we’re hearing about, cannibalism and whatnot, start to manifest themselves in the later stages of the disease. There are some radical metaphysicians now speculating about the potential for this virus to destroy the constitution of things beyond those physical individuals who have the disease. I would suggest that this, of course, would be suicide for the virus. It has, after all, a vested interest in keeping its host alive. I believe that the host is, in fact, everything beyond the boundaries of infection. Or, more conventionally, the host is the reality constructed to support us, and produce us, and on and on. Reality is an organism to this virus. That is, however irrational it may sound, a serviceable version of what has happened.”

Grant is in the grip of frenzied self-consciousness. He is close to understanding this disease and he can feel a terrible fear gathering in his good looks. He worries that his next question, that any question, or worse, that communication itself, is unsafe.

“OK Dr. Rauf, how are we catching this disease, how is it contagious?”

“Well, that’s a difficult question. One that is now being asked by teams of doctors, semioticians, linguists and anthropologists worldwide. A whole host of disciplines are working together on this one. It seems that people are waking up with it, so dreams seemed the obvious site of entry. It has been suggested that it is more likely that people are catching it as they move into a dream state. The structure of consciousness, identical to that of the unconscious, moves from the more or less illusory conditions of the personality into an automatic concrete version of the self found in dreams. The redistribution of elements may leave a person momentarily vulnerable to the virus, which may have already been there, dormant. Some specialists are suggesting that we use as little connotative language as possible, and to definitely avoid metalanguage. Like, well, like we’re using right now, Grant.”

“What does the virus look like, Dr. Rauf?”

“The immature virus looks a bit like a sunfish, brightly coloured, with spiky fins. And it has two long, pointy fangs, which it uses to practise scratching at the paradigms it will eventually invade. It’s important to remember, of course, that it is also becoming a tangent, and eventually the mature virus resembles the figure of abjection. The copy is a different matter. The copy is a strange, full and undetectable presence.”

Grant prepares his next question, pushing his finger into pursed lips, but he doesn’t ask it. Instead, he slides the finger into his mouth while making a slashing gesture across his throat with his free hand.