All My Days Are Saturdays

10. Undead

111 10 Undead The Undead (Mortuus vivens) consists of several familiar families. Among them are ghosts; vampires; and Frankenstein’s grotesque descendants , as could be expected a goodly number of professional athletes and politicians among these but also including a surprising percentage of environmentalists committed to recycling. Populating another family are shells, human forms inhabited by viruses or aliens, many of this last resembling slug caterpillars. Finally there are ghouls, both those who inhabit crypts and feed on corpses and those who flutter about in the evening like moths light-heartedly scaring teenagers and rarely eating, suffering agonizingly from anorexia, their labrums vestigial and often green or purple. The best known and most easily recognizable family is, of course, the zombie. In general zombies can be grouped into three species, the Walking , the Running, and the Staggering. The most common is the Staggering . Staggerers leak bodily fluids and, like starlings, travel in flocks. Their calls are easily recognizable, consisting of grunts and single low syllabic notes sometimes ending in painful grinds like the songs of the ravens. 112 All My Days Are Saturdays Zombies are skeletonizers and feed on human flesh. Their bites are poisonous , and they should be avoided by all except expert morticians as the slightest nip causes acute and fatal encephalitis. Most people believe that zombies should be eradicated, although some biologists think that zombies play an important evolutionary role in cropping the diseased and the weak, that is, Homo sapiens too slow, too old, too young, or too stupid to escape their grasp. For a time a group of creationist ministers believed zombies were only instars and that, if baptized, their sinful appetites would vanish and they would molt into the sanctified and spend the rest of their lives “walking with Jesus and spreading peace in the valley.” Unfortunately the baptismal experiment failed. No zombie shed its carnivorous ways, and shortly after the sprinkling all the ministers succumbed to evolution’s scarlet overbite. The smallest family of undead is the Unretired, a species of which I discovered in Connecticut at the end of August. In June I retired. I shifted money from the stock market into what was called a Stable Value Account. I put enough money into the account to purchase credit for my thirty-four years of teaching at the University of Connecticut. Officials managing benefits at the university calculated my debt to the state, and together we filled out a sheaf of forms. We sent the forms to the state comptroller’s office after which I waited for an invoice from the state and instructions on how to transfer the funds. July passed and I heard nothing. My retirement became irrevocable on the first of September. Puttering along for several months without receiving a retirement check was possible, but I am a worrier, the sort of person who fidgets when money drains away. Sleep vanishes, and I imagine bread and water and the poorhouse. What my bank account could stand my nerves could not tolerate. When I asked an official in the comptroller’s office if my papers would be processed by Christmas, he said, “We hope so.” The man’s three words meant no. Later another official telephoned me and said, “Professor Pickering, I am not you, and I cannot advise you. But if I were you I would teach for another year. By September next year matters should be running smoothly.” Consequently on August 20, I unretired, writing the comptroller’s office : “The reason I am rescinding my retirement is because I was told by the Retirement Services Division that there was little likelihood that my monthly pension benefits would begin in September which would leave me without an income. They also could not provide me with a date stating when my pension benefits would begin.” Undead 113 The person whose larder is full should not complain. Teaching has been a joy, although sometimes teaching people who can’t learn without being taught is exhausting. Additionally, I have always thought myself more witch doctor than one of the laborious cherubim or angels of light. In any case the upcoming academic year should be comparatively easy. I have the fall semester off and will teach a full load of classes only in the spring. Unretiring did not make me vinegary. “Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little before they begin to decay,”Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote. Moreover telling...