Zombies Don't Cry Read Online Free PDF Page A

one of the most frequently-asked questions.
    Naturally, I’ve developed my own approach to the question.
    I contracted myopia in infancy, when I was alive. It was corrected by laser surgery as soon as it was diagnosed, but it’s difficult for adults to figure out that a kid’s vision is blurred and difficult to measure the extent of the blurring, until he’s learned to recognize the letters of the alphabet, because that’s what standard eye-tests involve, so it wasn’t until I was five that I was diagnosed. One of the side-effects of infantile myopia—which can’t be corrected by subsequent surgery—is that the blind spots around the junctions of the optic nerve and the retina increase in size in the still-developing eyes. The fact that eyes have blind spots doesn’t make all that much difference to normal vision, because a pair of eyes can get enough information between them not to miss objects in the environment. If you close one eye, though, small objects at which you look directly do tend to disappear from view—and that phenomenon is much more marked in the once-myopic. The odd thing is, however, that you’re not conscious of any gap in the field of vision; you can only become aware of the disappearance if you rotate your head from side to side, so that the object alternates between visibility and invisibility. It’s not that the brain fills in the gap but rather that it refuses to register the fact that there is a gap.
    When my afterlife began, I assumed that the situation would be similar with respect to zombie consciousness. Like the once-myopic, I figured, the once-living simply wouldn’t notice the voids where fragments of their former selves had gone missing. That made me suspicious of myself, and suspicious of my sensation of being the same self as I’d ever been. So yes, in a word, the afterliving do suffer from angst —a cognitively fundamental fear of death—even though the prospect of death is behind them instead of in front of them. They suffer from an inherent fear of what Death the Sneak-Thief might have done to them.
    As for a counterpart to angst , which hasn’t yet been definitively named, any more than what the afterliving do instead of dying…well, I guess we have that too, even though the as-yet-unconfirmed possibility exists that, barring accidents and acts of extreme violence, afterlife might last forever.
    So, even though I didn’t feel any different from the way I’d felt when I was alive, I did stop taking myself quite so much for granted, even while I was still in hospital. Although I seemed to myself to be exactly the same person I’d been before, I was careful, from the very beginning, as any conscientious ex-myopic individual would be, to remind myself continually that I’d probably feel like that even if I wasn’t the same person, because my brain would simply ignore the gaps where the aspects of the old me had been that weren’t there any more.
    What I didn’t doubt, however, was that the bits of the old me that were still there were still the same. I was convinced that I’d still be able to play football like a Sunday morning maestro, no matter how difficult it might be to get a game, and I was absolutely certain that I was still in love, with Helena. And that, I thought, was the most important thing of all.
    Was I a fool? I don’t think so.
    The real situation, I must admit, isn’t quite as simple as my myopia analogy implies. The afterliving individuals whose brains need to be restored by the all-conquering superstimulant stem-cells don’t just have “gaps” where they were patched up, because the neuroarchitecture of the brain does far more than store memories. Zombies don’t just have issues with forgetfulness, but with the dispositions of their personality. Indeed—although it might, of course, be mere propaganda invented by the living to justify stripping the afterliving of their property, their social status and their human rights—it seems to be an