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| Mystery surrounds the beaching of 11 long-finned pilot whales at Farewell Spit beach in New Zealand on February 11, 2017. Photo: Marty Melville. |
Dear you,
I’m writing to explain about whales and zombies, the breathers and non-breathers, as it were.
About us zombies, you got three things right. Actually, make that three and a half things.
First, you are right that there are zombies. Yes, for realsies.
I mean, I’m two-finger typing this, me myself I, not some chatbot or clever dolphin. Ergo, I must be real, right?
Though by rights, it should have been a dolphin typing, as this is an underwater keyboard designed to be pressed by dolphins’ noses. Hence the two fingers. These keys are so big, I could be fisting them. But fisting would send the wrong message. So I’m two-fingering it. Underwater.
Which sentence I now realise is as likely to snigger-trigger the teenagers and other gutter-minds in the back. So let’s keep it clean and accept this is the only keyboard I have that works underwater, OK?
Working well underwater is that half a fact your author Max Brooks got right in his wonderful “World War Z”. All those chapters in which he portrays us zombies being quite comfy walking far underwater? They are mostly accurate.
The part that Max didn’t get totally right was that we like it as deep as possible. (You lot in the back can really stop sniggering now.) But I’ll get to the deep bit later.
Getting back to the other whole fact that you lot got right about us zombies, is that we eat brains. How, no one knows for sure.
I mean “how” as in how you who are still breathing got to know about it, not “how” as in how we non-breathers eat brains. (We eat politely with closed mouths and while the more fastidious prefer their lobes cut and brined, most of us munch our cerebrums a la tartare, if you have to know.)
Not even the elders have an idea how the fact that us zombies eat brains became part of folklore around the globe. From the manga produced in Japan; to Arne Svingen and Torstein Nordstrand’s excellent “Zombienaboen” in Norway; to southern Africa’s water monster that mothers still use to scare their kiddies away from deep water (before it comes out to bite open their skulls and suck their brains out) – everywhere people seem to know about the undead preferring a brain diet.
How? I mean, its not like we ever leave witnesses. All the elders swear that in the bad old days, before they realised that the Cain curse to “Walk the Earth for Eternity” did not exclude the underwater bits, they let no one escape. Not even those lovely big-brained Neandertals.
So how news of the brain sucking spread in all cultures is a bit of a mystery. I suspect old Rupert Sheldrake could be onto something with his Morphic Resonance thesis, which can be summarised as “the more people know stuff, the more people know stuff”.
It sounds self evident, until you realise Sheldrake means that various knowings float around like invisible tendrils of smoky sapience, ready to make more memories of themselves in those receptive of mind, both the thinking-with and eating-of kinds of minds.
There are rather a lot of the latter. At last count, there were about a thousand of us down here, which is a good number of former breathers who know about this brain sucking stuff down below.
Then that Walking Dead series came along, spreading the knowledge to millions up above, with the result that there’s got to be a whole lot of morphics resonating about brains being eaten, if Sheldrake is right.
Anyways, as I was saying, the elders have not been up for millenia and if old Cain is to be believed, there were so few people around back in his day, no one would have seen him scoop out the odd cranium in his quest for the energy boost that only glucose from a mammalian brain can give us undead.
Which brings me to the important point that few current breathers other than the author of the White Trash Zombie series, Diana Rowland, seem to be aware of: It takes a lot of concentrated glucose to keep an immortal metabolism metabolising.
Which is why, for the most part, zombies don’t lurch around much. Mostly, we just sit around and moan. Literally. Atrophied vocal cords and water densities do not allow the wide range of small mouth noises that helped to make us humans the super predators that we are above. Instead, we zombies speak in moans, although one of the new small ones say we sound like Dora in a movie “Finding Nemo”, "speeeheeekeeng eeeen loooohonnng moaaaaaans". (Trust me, it sounds even more ridiculous underwater than it looks on screen.)
Fortunately, we can still write well enough, there being nothing much wrong with our brains, even if our fine muscle control is perhaps better suited to fisting large pads than pinching a crayon.
This meant keeping records was a major schlepp until relatively recently, what with the trouble of stealing crayons without leaving muddy tracks in the nurseries and such.
That schlepp stopped the day the original metacommunicator, Gregory Bateson, arrived in August of 1980 and told us in Dora-speak about his underwater keyboard. It was constructed by some long forgotten Nasa technician to help with Bateson's dolphin language studies back in the sixties, back when Bakelite, Big and Durable were the three essential design elements. I was part of the team that fetched the massive keyboard from his storage in 1981, which mission may or may not have led to dear Doris writing her “I, Zombie” under the pen name Curt Selby a year later – but that is a story for another time.
How did Bateson “arrive” I hear you ask? Well, the usual way of course. He died, found out his soul could not leave his body and then noticed the glow of the ultraweak “soul photons” that the welcoming committee use to post their message at all graveyards.
These photons are normally only detectable by very sensitive equipment, but ask any newbie zombie, when you are freshly undead and muddy from clawing your way out of a grave, they shine quite bright.
Being a keen swimmer, Bateson threw himself into the nearest river and a few months later arrived in the Mariana Trench, where the Main Moan quietly keep the peace under the seas.
Which pun on peace and pieces I just realised would go unrecognised by all of you who don’t know the changed physiology of the average zombie body. See, being undead is not the same as dead. It is a whole new ball game and you lot in the back can stop sniggering already, as there is none of those hormonal ball games for us ever again, and praise be if you ask me.
Things are just too compressed down there. By which I mean down there in the Mariana Trench, not … down there.
This compression is what keeps a zombie body in one piece. That and the constant chill, the water being a cold 1 degree Celsius or 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Together the cold compression do for our bodies what the Egyptian embalmers failed to do for the many royals and nubian beauties they prepared for the afterworld.
We have two of those down here as well, really ancient Egyptians. In a lovely twist of poetic justice, not a single member of their royal families made it, despite all the full-body wrapping and storing of parts in jars. Turns out rooting out the brain with a copper needle shoved up the right nostril will stop zombification every time.
The overworked embalmers didn’t always go to all that nostril-digging trouble with the slave girls, so a couple of them were among the early arrivals at the trench.
That’s the strange thing about this zombie condition, it hits maybe one in a million, though it seems a religious state of mind may help catalyse the process. Which means we have a lot of people capable of holding very strong beliefs down here. Imagine our spiritual discombubulation then upon finding out that heaven is going as deep and as cold as possible, i.e. the Mariana Trench.
One in a million is a low number, but with an estimated 117 billion people having done the dust-to-dust shuffle to date, the Main Moan should hold many more than the few of us down in the trench.
Which brings me to the third thing you breathers got right about us non breathers – piercing the brain ends the moaning.
Over the millenia, many zombies have taken this option. Hey, no judging. You try and sit around underwater in the cold dark for a 1000 years and see in what state of mind you end up in. Most newbies don’t even make it past the first decade. The welcoming committee have learned to recognise the signs and we have trained swordfish who can painlessly skewer the brain through either eye.
For those who do make it through this initial adapting stage, well, the world being your oyster does not even begin to describe the places that open up for the zombie willing to go there.
Best of these places is the one we go to with intense meditation, which comes easy to the undead. Not for us zombies that “elephant charging through the mind” or the itching back or the suddenly full bladder while we zen out.
So while we may not have ended up in our original idea of heaven up above, the trench gets us close enough. After a month or so of absolute stillness in the deep we all get what Paul meant when he wrote, “be still, and know I Am”.
Chasing that bright light down that tunnel to where you experience all that love, all that perfect illumination… let me tell you, it beats tripping balls on any hallucinogen you care to name.
Even old Bateson, who was no slouch in the tripping balls department while alive in the 1970s, typed to me on this very keyboard that he wished he had taken up meditating with the Tibetians as a young man, instead of taking up drugs and trying to talk to dolphins.
Seriously… total stillness with the solemn weight of the Western Pacific pressing down all around you like a full-body hug… man, I can sit there four months at a time, just feeling comfortably numb.
Four months, however, is about as long as it takes for the last bite of fresh, fatty brain to metabolise; then the urge to eat surges again.
Which is why we are down deep. Reason A being, there is a lot more land to hunt underwater than above. Reason B, you didn’t really think we’d want your puny little 1,4 kg human brain when a Sperm whale packs a brain that weighs in at nine juicy kilograms, did you now?
Which brings us to the whales. Or rather, the beached whales.
That is on us and on behalf of the Main Moan, please accept our apology.
See, not all the whales we hunt swim into our traps. It’s not like we can stampede them over a cliff, the way old Clovis said they did with herds of bison in his day.
Or rather, it is, but in the opposite direction, if you get my, aha, drift.
Some gams are not game to be caught and these panicked pods will sooner beach themselves than have one of our fast child zombies tunnel through the giant nostrils on the back of each whale.
Once they are beached, our little ones go right in anyway, to rip out and pass back chunks of delicious whale brain for the hunters to take back to the rest of the Moan. We always work fast to avoid being seen by still-alive people but… well, let’s just say not all drownings are down to rip tides. Those beachcombers are a delicious bonus and if my mouth could water, it would be slavering now, just thinking about the taste explosion that is fresh human brain soaked in adrenalin.
But that is now happening less and less, as we strive not to alert the trigger-happy admirals with their mini nukes to our presence. To this end, we are working on new hunting tactics that will avoid the beached whales and bonus beachcombers, but so far even our oldest former hunters and most decorated former soldiers have failed to come up with a working strategy.
So, advance apologies if a few more whales beach themselves on a shore somewhere in the near future. It’s either the whales, or we start pulling down ships again. And trust me, you don’t want that.
Your servant, etc.
Zohm Bieh
