Mr. Gladhaus ’ Window

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. He stood on the other side of his living room window, quite dead.

**

It’s been a month since they started dying and standing back up. An actual, true to God, new age zombie apocalypse. None of that beautiful old-Hollywood-slow-moving-ghoul shit, but a sickness that broke people just enough for them to need a new name. It didn’t take long for me to accept that, which is what kept me alive. Others found zombies quite hard to believe, just like in any movie that refuses to call the dead what they are. When you name the thing, you can understand it. You can keep yourself from being lost to it.

At first, I found myself with a group of people who understood that, more or less. The first two days were hard and horrifying, but we could get each other through. Until we were separated on day three, leaving me alone and on the run. It took me another day to find Mr. Gladhaus in his home, alone and far beyond my help. All I could do was help myself, so I coxed the old man outside and shut myself in.

My biggest, lifelong fear has been windows. The idea of looking out one and making eye contact with anyone or anything sent my whole body into shut down. Over the years I’d tried many ways to overcome it, and finally, something worked. I pitched the scenario to my friends, though they had heard it before, this time asking how they might handle it. One in particular gave an answer that resonated and shocked me, clicked in a way that seemed to alter my brain chemistry altogether. He imagined the eyes on the other side of the window were a zombie’s, and described his survival plan. Are you fucking kidding me? Amazing. Show stopping, world changing, absolutely mind shattering. And how the fuck did I not think of that? Suddenly, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I love zombies and I’ve been thinking about them since my dad made me watch the Thriller music video at two years old. Cake. Whenever the fear appeared again, I simply imagined the dead rearing their rotting heads on the other side of the glass, and I knew how to act.

However, I did not have to imagine for long, and so it did not remain a solution for long. How quickly that life changing, fear-erasing solution decayed into a much worse nightmare. Hand shaking, I parted the curtain in Mr. Gladhaus’ living room. Dozens of times over I have done this to the same result, and again, I froze.

What a load of monkey’s paw bullshit.

*

Another week gone, but Mr. Gladhaus remained. This kept me paralyzed, not only the reimagining of my worst fear, the awful remix, but the bastardization of what was meant to be a solution. What comfort could a zombie apocalypse ever bring to a living girl? The clarity of morals, the so impossible and unreal ease in which good and evil can be separated. The way that fighting back was not only a fair option, but the righteous one. No consequences to it. If zombies are dead, it is balance to keep them that way. This killing could be done with no regret, the one single apocalypse in which anyone had a shot at survival and they could have it without hard choices.

In theory. But what I see now challenges it all. I’ve witnessed gruesome attacks and seen the near-corpses rise back up to spread more carnage. It seems so mindless, as violence often does. Zombies are meant to be thoughtless, vacant, and dead. But no one has crawled out of their graves, no one has waited for full death to begin hunting brains. My zombies were merely sick people, and I saw that in Mr. Gladhaus’ eyes, through his window.

He should be ambling away with the others, milling about. But he stood firmly in the flowerbeds he spent decades nurturing, never taking his eyes off the room where he once lived. Where he could one day live again? I wondered if this sickness would pass, like the breaking of a child’s fever to their desperate parent’s relief. And if not, would the infected all die and rot, or would they never drop? Until I knew, there was nothing I could do to them but keep them away.

Were they lonely? I stared deeply into the old man’s eyes, but couldn’t get a read. When I closed the curtain, I began to take stock of the room for the first time. I had upon arrival already done a sweep for supplies, but I had never looked through the room with empathy. This of course was a scary and dangerous thing to do, caring to understand your enemy. But if I could not tell what exactly my enemy was, it was better to assume the face of compassion. On his coffee table, I found an open poetry book. The page read,

My eyes reflect an endless sky,

Full of my clouds;

Gray walls buzzing with electricity,

Accumulating condensation.

Finally the downpour begins,

So I walk, stand, sit in the rain,

Drink it in,

And let it run down my face.

They say the eye is the window to the soul,

So I guess I’m in the window of the storm.

Images in glass, in lens,

Of dark and rain and flash and spirit.

The sun sets before midday;

A spectacular sight.

My eyes reflect an endless sky,

And the storm rages on.

-WINDOW OF THE STORM

I sat in silence, eyes brimming with tears, accumulating my own condensation. These zombies weren’t dead people, they were just sick. Mr. Gladhaus didn’t attack the window when he looked in. It seemed like he had a sense of belonging more than a thirst for blood. Safe in his home, I felt helpless in my inability to help.

The old man had stocked many cans, but my supplies were dwindling. In all my time holed up there, I lost contact with the outside world. I knew not of my group’s fate, nor anything else beyond the zombie-man in the window. I hoped people were beginning to overcome the sickness, I worried for the ones who would heal and remember what they had done. I wondered if the ones who had eaten people would ever recover. It was becoming time to head out into the world and find out for myself, or at least find some more food. The first day, I only went next door and raided Mr. Gladhaus’s closest neighbor’s house. On the second day, as I let sunlight and invincibility soak into my skin, I nearly died. Exploring backyard to backyard, enjoying the benefits of fences, I was swarmed by 15 zombies. Someone in the neighborhood must have been having a barbecue at the start of the outbreak. While I managed to turn back and immediately shut the gate again, the shock sent me back into the safety of Mr. Gladhaus’s home. I had to hit one of the zombies with the bat I carried to hold people at a distance in order to make it out. They fell to the ground without a sound or further movement, and I fled before confirming their fate. I tried to tell myself that they would have gotten back up after I left, but the crunching of their skull echoed in my arms for days after.

Back to the window, studying Mr. Gladhaus, and contemplation. Having mostly lost my appetite after party crashing the barbecue, I didn’t need to venture back outside for a while. I even stopped exploring Mr. Gladhaus’ bookshelves, instead spending my time staring into his eyes or closing mine to sleep. I was haunted by gruesome memories and by the sick walking around outside. My hope now was that all of these people were truly dead and risen, rather than alive. I can’t have killed someone, smashed their skull and exposed their brains. I don’t want to be a zombie.