Jeffrey Ford - Malthusian's Zombie

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MALTHUSIAN'S ZOMBIE

by JEFFREY FORD

I'm not sure what nationality Malthusian was, but he spoke with a strange accent; a stuttering lilt of

mumblement it took weeks to fully comprehend as English. He had more wrinkles than a witch and a

shock of hair whiter and fuller than a Samoyed's ruff. I can still see him standing at the curb in front of my

house, slightly bent, clutching a cane whose ivory woman's head wore a blindfold. His suit was a size and

a half too large, as were his eyes, peering from behind lenses cast at a thickness that must have made his

world enormous. The two details that halted my raking and caused me to give him more than a neighborly

wave were his string tie and a mischievous grin I had only ever seen before on my six-year-old daughter

when she was drawing one of her monsters.

"Malthusian," he said from the curb.

I greeted him and spoke my name.

He mumbled something and I leaned closer to him and begged his pardon. At this, he turned and

pointed back at the house down on the corner. I knew it had recently changed hands, and I surmised he

had just moved in.

"Welcome to the neighborhood," I said.

He put his hand out and I shook it. His grip was very strong, and he was in no hurry to let go. Just as I

realized he was aware of my discomfort, his grin turned into a wide smile and he released me. Then he

slowly began to walk away.

"Nice to meet you," I said to his back.

He turned, waved, and let loose an utterance that had the cadence of poetry. There was something

about leaves and fruit and it all came together in a rhyme. Only when he had disappeared into the woods

at the end of the block did I realize he had been quoting Pope. " 'Words are like leaves, where they most

abound, beneath, little fruit or sense is found.' " As a professor of literature, this amused me, and I

decided to try to find out more about Malthusian.

I was on sabbatical that year, supposedly writing a book concerning the structure of Poe's stories,

which I saw as lacking the energeic ascent of the Fichtian curve and being comprised solely of

denouement. Like houses of Usher, the reader comes to them, as in a nightmare, with no prior

knowledge, at the very moment they begin to crumble. What I was really doing was dogging it in high

fashion. I'd kiss my wife goodbye as she left for work, take my daughter to school, and then return home

to watch reruns of those shows my brother and I had devoted much of our childhood to. Malthusian's

daily constitutional was an opportunity to kill some time, and so, when I would see him passing in front of

the house, I'd come out and engage him in conversation.

Our relationship grew slowly at first, until I began to learn the cues for his odd rendering of the

language. By Thanksgiving I could have a normal conversation with him, and we began to have lengthy

discussions about literature. Oddly enough, his interests were far more contemporary than mine. He

expressed a devotion to Pynchon, and the West African writer Amos Tutuola. I realized I had spent too

long teaching the canon of Early American works and began to delve into some of the novels he

mentioned. One day I asked him what he had done before his retirement. He smiled and said something

that sounded like mind-fucker.

I was sure I had misunderstood him. I laughed and said, "What was that?"

"Mind-fucker," he said. "Psychologist."

"Interesting description of the profession," I said.

He shrugged and his grin dissipated. When he spoke again, he changed the subject to politics.

Through the winter, no matter the weather, Malthusian walked. I remember watching him struggle along

through a snowstorm one afternoon, dressed in a black overcoat and black Tyrolean hat, bent more from

some invisible weight than a failure of his frame. It struck me then that I had never seen him on his return

journey. The trails through the woods went on for miles, and I was unaware of one that might bring him

around to his house from the other end of the block.

I introduced him to Susan, my wife, and to my daughter, Lyda. There, at the curb, he kissed both their

hands, or tried to. When Lyda pulled her hand back at his approach, he laughed so I thought he would

explode. Susan found him charming, but asked me later, "What the hell was he saying?"

The next day, he brought a bouquet of violets for her; and for Lyda, because she had shown him her

drawing pad, he left with me a drawing he had done rolled up and tied with a green ribbon. After dinner,

she opened it and smiled. "A monster," she said. It was a beautifully rendered charcoal portrait of an

otherwise normal middle-aged man, wearing an unnerving look of total blankness. The eyes were heavy

lidded and so realistically glassy, the attitude of the body so slack, that the figure exuded a palpable sense

of emptiness. At the bottom of the page in a fine calligraphic style were written the words Malthusian's

Zombie.

"I told him I liked monsters," said Lyda.

"Why is that a monster?" asked Susan, who I could tell was a little put off by the eerie nature of the

drawing. "It looks more like a college professor on sabbatical."

"He thinks nothing," said Lyda, and with her pinky finger pointed to the zombie's head. She had me

tack it to the back of her door, so that it faced the wall unless she wanted to look at it. For the next few

weeks, she drew zombies of her own. Some wore little hats, some bow ties, but all of them, no matter

how huge and vacant the eyes, wore mischievous grins.

In early spring, Malthusian invited me to come to his house one evening to play a game of chess. The

evening air was still quite cool, but the scent of the breeze carried the promise of things green. His house,

which sat on the corner lot, was enormous, by far the largest in the neighborhood. It had three acres of

woods appended to it and at the very back touched upon a lake that belonged to the adjacent town.

Malthusian was obviously not much for yard work or home repair; the very measure of a man in this

part of the world. A tree had cracked and fallen through the winter and it still lay partially obstructing the

driveway. The three-story structure and its four tall columns in front needed paint; certain porch planks

had succumbed to dry rot and its many windows were streaked and smudged. The fact that he took no

initiative to rectify these problems made him yet more likable to me.

He met me at the door and ushered me into his home. I had visions of the place being like a dim,

candle-lit museum of artifacts as odd as their owner, and had hoped to decipher Malthusian's true

character from them as if they were clues in a mystery novel. There was nothing of the sort. The place

was well lit and tastefully, though modestly, decorated.

"I hope you like merlot," he said as he led me down an oak paneled hallway toward the kitchen.

"Yes," I said.

"It's good for the heart," he said and laughed.

The walls I passed were lined with photographs of Malthusian with different people. He moved quickly

and I did not linger out of politeness, but I thought I saw one of him as a child, and more than one of him

posing with various military personnel. If I wasn't mistaken, I could have sworn I had caught the face of

an ex-president in one of them.

The kitchen was old linoleum in black-and-white checkerboard design, brightly lit by overhead

fluorescent lights. Sitting on a table in the center of the large expanse was a chessboard, a magnum of

dark wine, two fine crystal goblets, and a thin silver box. He took a seat on one side of the table and

extended his hand to indicate I was to sit across from him. He methodically poured wine for both of us,

opened the box, retrieved a cigarette, lit it, puffed once, and then led with his knight.

"I'm not very good," I said as I countered with my opposite knight.

He waved his hand in the air, flicked ash onto the floor, and said, "Let's not let it ruin our game."

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