Catastrophic Personality Adjustment Counseling: The End

Even the heavy brown and green curtains cannot keep all the sunlight out of the office. He has a huge smile on his face and it refuses to be subdued.

The counselor cannot help but smile back. “Session twenty one. You seem to be in a fantastic mood.” She said rhetorically.

He nodded. “ I almost got the crap kicked out of me today.” He explained.

The counselor was confused. “That doesn’t sound promising.” She pointed out.

He shook his head. “I’m not that worried about it. You know what I love?” He asked out of the blue.

She shook her head. “Enlighten me.” She replied.

He looked like a kid on Christmas morning. “I love coffee. More specifically I love the epic poems masquerading as caffeine delivery systems. Double Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Decaf organic chocolate brownie iced Vanilla double-shot gingerbread Frappuccino extra hot with foam whipped cream upside down double blended. It’s like a dancing with your mouth.” He gushed.

“Ok, start from the beginning.” She laughed.

He looked confused. “The beginning of what?” He asked, then realized that he didn’t sound like he was making much in the way of sense. “Oh, my obsession with coffee? I guess it all starts with this place I found that was willing to serve me.” He explained. “It’s this chain place that looks way fancier than it actually is and I know now that they burn their beans which is great for me but most humans have more detailed taste profile…” he trailed off for a second.

“Most?” She asked, landing on the right word.

He nodded. “I was, uh” He cleared his throat. “Almost a week ago I was sitting at this place. Reading “For the Win” by Cory Doctorow.” This group of good old boys came into the store and placed their orders. Their leader bumped into my table while the others were harassing the baristas. The book had me feeling braver than I should have so when he tried to sit on my table I made my presence known.” He explained. “The guy turned around and got in my face. ‘You say something corpse?” He growled at me. I nodded and held my ground ‘yeah’ I said trying to sound braver than I felt. ‘ I said excuse me. See you spilled my drink and while you appear to be in dire need of a shower and a breath mint I feel that it is common courtesy for you to apologize when you spill another person’s drink.’ He got real close in and I could smell the beer on his breath. ‘Well then I’m in luck, ‘cause you ain’t no person. Now, why don’t you get up, and get the hell out of here before we take you apart like a Lego set.’ I wanted to fight him, I wanted to fight all of them. But I could see the other patrons in my peripheral vision trying to hide behind books, newspapers, and laptop screens…so I chickened out. I stood up. Looked down at my feet and gave up. ‘Frankie go now, sorry make mess, me bad.’ I mumble as they laugh at me. The leader keeps talking as I leave ‘So gawt damn tired of these Obamanation’s thinking the own every gawt damn place’ I hear before the door closes.” He hasn’t looked up from his feet the entire time. After a moment he holds out his empty hand. “In the box of my belongings from my old life, I had an MP3 player. On the Back there’s this quote. ‘If you have to crawl to live, stand, and die.’ When I betray myself in moments like that I can feel that little player like a judgmental weight in my pocket.” He wipes tears from his eyes.

The counselor was still confused. “How did this end up with you in such a good mood?” she asked.

He finally looked up, “Oh! After I left I ran into this couple who were walking by the coffee shop. I’m pretty sure they heard the guy before the door closed. The guy asked me about my book and we got to talking. They invited me to their coffee shop. A place a few blocks up the road from here. I’ve gone there every day since. They know my name. The owner is a human but her daughter died of lung cancer a few years back and she came back to life. She didn’t care about the social rules or the fact that her daughter no longer remembered her. She refused to let her go. Her daughter got into politics in her afterlife and has been running meetings for a group called Stronger than Death.”

The counselor stifled a giggle.

He smiled “I know it’s S.T.D. but it’s a support and political action group continuing the fight for afterlife rights. They know me there, I’ve bought my roommate by…I’ve finally found a place where I feel like I belong, where I feel I can make a difference.” He explained.

The counselor nodded. “Enjoy that feeling. In fact. If you ever take any of the advice I’ve given you let it be what I am about to say. Happiness is the best revenge. Be happy and pass that happiness on to others.”  She smiled at him

He nodded. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He said, standing up and heading for the door. “See you next week?” He asked. She nodded.

The Counselor is nervously tapping her pen on the heel of her shoe.  He hasn’t shown up yet and considering the state of the nation she wasn’t really that surprised. She checked her watch and saw that he was almost fifteen minutes late. She got out of her chair and began to pace. He wasn’t breaking a law by not showing up, none of them were, she reminded herself. In fact, she realizes and stops pacing. It’s not that had stopped coming that worried her. Hell they were allowed to stop coming as soon as they wanted, it was the fact that if they stopped coming today and there was a better than even chance that they were out on the streets, protesting.

The knock on the door startled her and she stopped pacing. She hadn’t even realized she had started pacing again. “Come in.” She said, trying to keep an even tone.

It was him. He looked torn up, like he has swallowed fire and it was burning him up inside. Without saying anything he shut the door and sat on the couch. She quickly sat in her chair. She didn’t know if he didn’t want to look at her, or couldn’t look at her. He stared at his shoes. “I wanted to believe.” He started.

The tension she felt before had disappeared, she knew it was on the other side of the office door, just 

waiting for her, but she’d worry about that when she had to.

He sighed the way a person does when their trying not cry. “I wanted to believe that I was part of this, great force. A great force of positive change.” Tears left dark circles on his jeans. “That along with my fellow un-dead brothers and sisters I was helping to push towards a new time, a better time, where we could live in peace with the rest of mankind.”

It wasn’t the first time in her career she felt like she needed to say something but didn’t have the first clue of what that something was, so she did the next best thing. She waited, as patiently as she could.

He wiped tears from his eyes. “But this election...” He trailed off. “All I wanted, was to shed the image of monstrosity that humanity had created for us.” He looked up finally “They dismembered my roommate three days ago. Tore him limb from limb with their trucks. See we don’t die by hanging, so they found a more, entertaining way to get the job done.” He looked back down at his feet for a long time.

She looked down at her notes and saw that they had been smeared by her own tears. “The laws haven’t changed yet, there is still time –“

“Public opinion has already changed, and truthfully I wonder if it was ever as progressive as we were led to believe.” He interrupted.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket, another news alert most likely. The last seventy two hours had brought unimaginably horrible violence. Fights at pro and anti-Zombie protests, both sides blaming the other for starting it. She had unplugged her television when she realized that in the first day she couldn’t find a channel that was talking about the losses of zombie life, only the so called ‘human’ injury toll, but the cameras could not avoid the scattered piles of dismembered and burning body parts. Then Afterlife Heights a low income housing district had been walled off with trucks and firebombed, the ones that were able to escape the fires were met with shotgun blasts from the high ground of truck beds.

After that it descended into nationwide chaos.        

“You know there’s isn’t a single zombie movie or book where the zombies are sentient and have good reason to hate humanity?” He snorted a halfhearted laugh. “The best part is, the One Life Party was successful in keeping “Zombie” as a race option off the US census, so even the best guesses of our actual numbers are most likely catastrophically low.”

She nodded and dropped her notes in the tiny trashcan next to her desk. The fact that they were on the third floor did nothing to mute the chaos in the streets below.

“I used to think we could all just be people. But in the last week I’ve learned one unavoidable fact about humanity.” He said listening to the crashing cars, the screams of terror. “There must always, be a monster.” Together, they watched the window light up a bright orange.

Catastrophic Personality Adjustment Counseling: Part 2

Zombie is pacing his counselor’s tiny office. She is looking through his journal. She pays him almost no mind even though he is clearly frustrated. “So that was my first counseling session.” She read out loud from his journal. “At first I wasn’t sure how to go about it, being a zombie and all that. But pretty quickly I realized that my counselor was right. I don’t know much about what kind of person I was before I died, but once I started writing I couldn’t stop, and what I was writing was opinionated and insistent. I had strong feelings about my new life, the world I found myself in and my experiences in it, which ranged from amazing and enlightening to frustrating and infuriating.” She finished the entry and closed his journal. Finally looking up to watch him pace. “So, this is your tenth session. By all accounts you’re doing very well.” She complimented him.

His pacing slowed but did not stop. “If you say so.” He grumbled.

She put his notebook down and picked up her notepad. “Something on your mind?” she asked.

He flopped into the couch with a heavy sigh. “Breathers.”

She scribbled a note. “What have I said about that world?” Her reminder came offhandedly, the way a parent chastises with an obvious question.

He rolled his eyes and stifled the urge to start pacing again. “Racism is a tool of oppression and while you can and must resist the powers that oppress you, never underestimate the poisonous ease their mindset has in corrupting your view of the world.”

She looks up from her pad. “That sounds more like something the Zombie Rights Activist Rigor Mortis would say.”

He met her gaze. “It’s not ‘like’ something he would say, it’s something he did say.”

She wrote a note. “And how much of Mr. Mortis’ work have you read?” She asked.

He shrugged. “Enough to know that the Z.R.A isn’t exactly the be all and end all of justice for my kind.” He watched her carefully.

She stopped writing. “What’s been bothering you about the living?” She asked. Setting her notepad down on her desk.

He tapped his temple three times. “They’re obsessed with brains.”

She pulled her feet up on the recliner and covered them with a blanket. “How so?” she asked.

He leaned forward on the couch. “Every licensed restaurant that serves Zombies serves mainly cow brains. The really high class joins that serve human brains, follow the law and serve certified death row inmates, and those places are expensive, so a majority of the population sticks to cow, which I am more than fine with.”

“Have you ever tried human brain?” She asked with nothing more than curiosity in her voice.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Once.”

“And?” She asked encouragingly.

He sat back in the couch and looked up at the ceiling. “My roommate is a dishwasher over at the Cranium Café. He was given some left overs one night and we tried it. Neither of us was terribly impressed. I found the flavor and texture to be too…rich.” He sat upright again. “Look, not a single zombie I’ve ever met obsesses over brains. We eat when we’re hungry and I’m just as lazy as everyone else who actually has a pulse so I go to Brainagain’s and I eat, Big deal right? But at least twice a day at work I hear ‘Hey man I ain’t a corpseaphobe but you keep looking at my skull like that and I’ma get pissed off’. Like dude! You face is on your skill and I have to make eye contact with you to do my job you idiot!” He angrily flopped back into the couch, once again staring at the ceiling in frustration. His eyes searching the tiles for some sort of sense. “Just because I’m a zombie doesn’t mean I have an uncontrollable desire to eat every brain I see”

She leaned over and grabbed her pad and scribbled a quick note. “So you’re being mistreated by your customer base?” She asked while writing.

He shook his head. “Not all of them, just the ones who ‘aren’t corpseaphobic’”

She set her pad down in her lap. “You can report them. That kind of harassment is against the law.”

Zombie snorted a sarcastic laugh. “So is refusing service based on your pulse or lack thereof but guess how many places I’ll never be allowed to shop in.” shoved his hands in the pockets of his hoodie.

She twirled her pen for a moment and then clipped it to her pad. “You seem to be developing a very strong sense of right and wrong.” She pointed out.

He shook his head without looking up from the couch. “Maybe, it feels more like I’m developing a finely tuned understanding of ignorance and the sheer ineffectiveness a single person has over the course of history.”

“How so?” She asked.

“Regardless of how stupid some people are, I know there are stupid zombies as well, and with the basic understanding of math that I have I can pretty much tell you that if we don’t already, zombies will soon outnumber living humans.”  He sat up and looked at his counselor. “Look the LAST thing I want is for any of the human apocalyptic wet dreams to actually happen, but like I said, humans aren't the only ones who are stupid.” He clarified.

She grabbed her pen and scribbled another note. “Is this a casual worry or…”

He shook his head. “Like I said, every zombie I ever met is just as lazy and laid back as almost every human. But someone’s putting up the resistance signs, someone is writing the literature encouraging us to give the humans what they desperately say they want.”

“And is that what you believe? That humans actually want to face a zombie apocalypse?” She asked.

He shook his head. “Hell no, I’m a zombie and I don’t want a zombie apocalypse, no human actually wants one either.”

“Why do you think they are obsessed with the fantasy then?” She asked.

“They lack a proper concept of scale.” He started. “Human beings have made it a long, LONG way in history on nothing more than fear and ingenuity. They allow the most close minded, fearful and richest among them to lead the rest, most of whom are willfully ignorant bastards that carry around the biggest guns a human can carry and yet still they run in terror at even the mention of equality. This cycle repeats every generation without fail and we have never, not once, learned from it.” He finished, his shoulders slumped.

“You said ‘we’ just then, why?” She asked,

“Because I came from them, I used to be them, just because I don’t have a pulse, and cannot remember being one of them does not entirely sever me from the consequences of their decisions as a species.” He clarified.

“What history lesson would apply to this situation in your opinion?” She asked.

He waved his hand almost dismissively. “Pick and era. Women’s rights, Civil rights, the ADA, same sex marriage, This country has a long, terrible history of holding itself together by targeting a minority and keeping them as marginalized as possible for as long as possible. And those groups didn’t have sixty years of fiction stacked up against them.”

She nodded. “The media has never been kind to the undead.”

He got up and started pacing again “I had hoped after ‘the gays’ became ‘people’, that we might have an easier time of it. But for some reason the LGBTQ population got right in line with the rest of the masses and joined in their hatred for the next new minority. Why humans celebrate getting to the top by kicking the people below them is beyond me.”

She tapped her pen on her pad a few times considering her next question. “Is it really that simple?” She asked.

He shook his head. “Of course not, there’s no part of this that’s simple. But even after ten years it doesn’t feel like humanity is willing to see this situation as anything other than an apocalypse, which to be fair is vast different than the Gay marriage era, because no matter how hard the Tea Party tried to spread the rumors, people refused to believe that gay men were going to march around the globe in a thoughtless mass chanting “coooooooooooks!” and eating straight men from the waist down.” He said down smiling at his horrible joke.

She suppressed a smile herself. “That would have set them back in their quest for equal rights.” She added.

He stopped smiling. “I am being serious though, it doesn’t seem to matter what kind of person I want to be, just what kind of monster Hollywood fantasizes I am.”

She pulled her feet out from under her blanket and sat forward in her chair. “Everyone struggles with who they want to be versus who they are perceived to be.”

He shook his head. “I don’t like it.” He shoved his hands back into his hoodie pockets.

She nodded “Welcome to humanity.” She replied, standing up.

He stood as well and moved toward the door, stopping with his hand on the handle. “So if a vegetarian is someone who eats only vegetables then why are so many people proud of being humanitarians?” He asked.

Catastrophic Personality Adjustment: Part 1 (Blood and Profit Returns in 3 weeks)

Death is not an easy concept for the average person to handle, which is funny because it’s pretty clear that most of us don’t have the first clue about life either.

Cold was the first sensation he registered. At first he couldn’t locate the origin of the sensation but as more of his mind regained awareness it became the input that defined his reality. The cold moved closer and began to awaken and define the extremities of his body. He could feel his back and shoulder blades pressed against it. It traveled up his neck and into his shoulders. Curved around his elbows and brought feeling into his hands. He could sense it defining the edges of his hips and the bulk of his rear end. As his legs began to register sensation he could no longer hold back a full body shiver and his teeth began to chatter. He opened his eyes slowly as he reflexively wrapped his arms around his torso. Where ever he was there was very little light and it was diffused softly, he touched his face, but found nothing clouding his vision. He blinked several times and his vision cleared. He could now see that he was naked, He was sitting on a metal table, a sheet had covered him and bunched at his waist when he sat up. Next to the table there was a chair with what turned out to be a gray pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt.

It took him almost ten minutes to get the pins and needles out of his legs and make sure they could carry his weight. Once he was sure he could stand he got dressed and felt the stiffness in the rest of his joints. There was a piece of paper under the sweat suit. All it said was ‘Room 305’. The room he was in was small, barely enough room for the table he had woken up on and the chair that held the clothing. From where he was standing he could almost reach the handle of the door, which led him into a plain looking hallway that was brighter but still not fully lit, There was a sign on the far wall that had 300 – 315 with an arrow pointing down the left side of the hallway and 316 – 330 with an arrow pointing down the right side of the hallway. He checked his paper again and made his way down the left side of the hall looking for room 305.

The door to room 305 was open. Soft orange light drew a rectangle on the concrete floor. He stopped and knocked on the door frame, taking a look into the room. There was an woman sitting in an old worn reclining chair. She wore no shoes and her feet were buried in a deep plush rug that appeared to be nothing more than random sprays of color. She smiled warmly when she noticed him in the doorway.

“You must be Tony.” She said, waving her hand. “Come in, sit down.” She gestured to the empty couch across from her recliner.

More than anything the mention of a name caused his curiosity to override his caution. “I can’t remember anything, why can’t I remember anything?” He asked, sitting down.

She sat back in her chair and looked at him for a moment, taking in his current state of awareness. Finally she replied. “Because you died.”

The answer hit him like a truck. “I what?” He asked in shock.

She nodded slowly. “It says here” She held up his report. “That you were stabbed during an attempted robbery.”

His gaze was a thousand miles long as he tried with what little cognitive power he had to remember something. “I – I don’t remember anything.” He finally admitted.

She nodded. “That’s one of the primary side effects of the Necrophage.” She handed him a pamphlet that was covered with smiling people in fun settings. “It’s the medical term for the disease that brings the dead back to life.” She said.

He looked at the bright green letters screaming this is your afterlife! At him. He opened it, scanned it, quickly realized he didn’t have the desire to read it at the moment and closed it again. “I’m a freaking zombie?” He said in disbelief, mostly to himself.

The woman in the chair nodded. “In layman’s terms.”

He tossed the pamphlet aside in anger. “I don’t care how you’re supposed to say it. I died and some virus I have brought me back to life.”

The counselor nodded quietly. She readjusted, picking her feet up off the carpet and sat cross legged in her chair.

He grabbed the pamphlet again and started folding it in half. “And that's why I can’t remember anything?” He asked.

She nodded. “Side effect of the Virus. Honestly we’re not really sure why it happens, but everyone that is infected with the Necrophage comes back to life with almost no memory of their past life. Its one of the reasons we started this program.” She explained with a softness in her voice.

He looked around the room and held up the pamphlet that had now been folded and unfolded in different ways half a dozen times. “What is this program anyway?”

“Catastrophic Personality Adjustment Counseling. Or C.P.A.C. for short. I’m here to help you assimilate back into society.” She handed him another stack of papers that explained the program.

He looked down at the cover page where the program name was printed in bold black block letters. “So, zombie 101.” He clarified.

She shook her head. “We’re not going to teach you how to mob humans and tear them limb from limb, It’s more focused on helping you discover what kind of person you are now. Helping you define and understand your new personality so you can live a pleasant and fulfilling afterlife.” She noticed he seemed to be blankly staring at the stack of documentation in his hands. “You’ll want to check those pamphlets out this week, they cover the powers of the Z.R.A”

 He looked up at her. “The Z.R.A?” He asked.

She nodded. “The Zombie Rights Amendment. It’s been the law for almost ten years now.” She leaned over the side of her chair and grabbed a book out of a cardboard box on the floor. She then handed the book to him. “This is your daily personality journal. Try to write in it at least once a day. It’s going to be one of the most important tools you have In developing your new personality.” She then grabbed the cardboard box, handing it over as well. “This is everything you had on you when you came to the hospital. There is a map in there that will lead you back to your apartment.”

He rustled through the items in the smallish box for a second until a thought hit him. “Did I have a job?” He asked while looking at his license.

She nodded. “You do. You have already been transferred to a different department to make it easier on yourself and those you used to work with. You start your retraining next week.” She clarified.

With the box in his hands he stood up and looked at the door to the counselor’s office. “So, do I come back next week or something?” He asked looking back at her.

She nodded. “And once a week. Until you feel you are ready to take on the world by yourself.”

He nodded and opened the door, went out into the hall. “I’ll see you next week then, I guess.” He said as he closed the door.

The counselor went to her desk grabbed his file from a stack and flipped it open to the patient status page and began writing her notes.