She walks like a zombie, arms straight and rigid, held at a slight acute angle from her body. Her dark hair is long, loose, and unkempt, falling in wiry curls down her back to the sharp jut of her shoulder blades. She walks slowly, mechanically making her way across the low grassy hill that separates the grocery store from a nearby high school. Animated cadaver, I think, horrified at this human facsimile before me. The thought makes me cringe, though, and I am appalled by my cruel reaction. Already, she is disappearing from my sight as she descends into the hollow where she makes her home, so very close to mine, yet worlds apart.
I discovered her quite by accident several months ago while I was walking on the nature path behind my house. I had been walking on the main path for nearly an hour, and decided to take a detour onto a less-traveled path that followed the shore of a large pond. Caught up in my own thoughts, enjoying the natural beauty surrounding me, and trying to block out the annoying hum of the freeway, I found myself coming in sight of the end of the path. Unwilling to surrender myself into the throes of civilisation just yet, I turned from the trail onto a still more overgrown path. It was strewn with old beer cans, and various other bits of trash. Annoyed, I picked up a beer can, a coffee cup, and a plastic six-pack yoke, cursing the idiots who had so carelessly left these things. As I continued walking, the litter increased, and it occurred to me that I might very soon encounter a hobo. Rather than frightening me, as this thought perhaps should have, I was rather invigorated by the potential danger lurking around the next curve in the trash-ridden path.
The sun was beginning to sink low behind me as I rounded the bend in the path and came into view of the street that runs past my house. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a woman sitting in front of a blue tent, tucked up against the hill, out of view of the road. I kept walking.
“Have you come from Dr. Osman?” Her voice was sharp and clear and commanding. I stopped and half turned towards her.
“Doctor… doctor… who?”
“DR. OSMAN!” she repeated with an impatient flick of her hand. “Did you bring the medicine?”
“No. I came from there,” I replied, pointing awkwardly towards the woods from which I had just emerged, a dazed and daydreaming fool. Even as I said it, I winced at the absurdity of the statement. The woman did not seem to notice my awkwardness and launched into a long and rambling diatribe against… me? The doctor? The expected messengers? Her words sounded even and rational, although they comprised sentences full of non sequiturs and nonsense words, all with heartfelt inflection. She did not sound like a crazy person, yet she could not speak sense.
She continued ranting about the doctor. We were still so far apart that I could not even distinguish facial features, and everything said was uttered in tones just below shouting. Unable to think of anything else, but wanting desperately to help her, I offered her my cell phone, and took a few steps towards her.
“Stay where you are! Do not come any closer!” She all but shouted.
I froze, instantly. She continued harshly:
“Why d’you think I need a cell phone, huh?”
“Well, I thought you’d want to make a call… to… to… Dr. Osman,” I stuttered, feeling more foolish than ever.
“Well I don’t” she sneered.
“Okay, well, I have to go. Have a good day!”
I stumbled slightly as I turned to go away from her, and began walking rapidly towards the grocery store I was now in sight of. Towards civilisation. Anything was better than this unpredictable, commanding woman.
“You have a good day, too.” I knew she didn’t mean it.
“By the way,” she continued, with a tinge of sarcasm, “you get a zero”. Her voice was steady and clear and authoritative, and I turned back towards her in wonderment, half-halting my retreat, before hurrying on, up over the slight ridge and then across mowed grass, and, finally, onto sidewalks and civilisation.
For years I have played a childlike game with my brother, Nathan. I ask him how much he loves me, on a scale of one to ten, and pretend to be angered if he doesn’t answer with a number greater than ten. His typical answer is “oh, zero” and, then, “just kidding, eleven point five.” It’s my silly way of seeking reassurance, and his of giving it without being forced into overly emotional displays of affection. I don’t know what scale that woman was judging me by, but whatever it was, I failed.
On a scale of one to ten, you get a zero. You get a zero. You get a zero. She did not exist on my terms: she was homeless, but she had a home, a little tent in a grassy knoll. She was unkempt, but not filthy. Her reality was not mine, yet somehow I could not simply dismiss her as crazy.
No, no, you don’t understand, I wanted to plead, I stopped because I thought I could help somehow. I spoke to you, because everyone deserves to be addressed as a human, to be given the courtesy of acknowledgement by their fellow creatures. I stopped because I’m a good person.
No, it wasn’t true. I knew it, and she, this wild woman, regressing into insanity and animalism knew it, too. I stopped, not because I wanted her to feel human, but because I wanted to feel human. I didn’t speak with her to connect with her, but rather to display my magnanimity, to the audience of my Ego.
If life is about connection, about empathy, about the bonds of social animals, not status, or social experiments, then yes, I got a zero. Most days, I get a zero.
Most days, I, too, walk like a zombie.
