The Displaced

Nobody ever asks the displaced how they feel. That's the first thing you learn when you become one of the forgotten. You learn that the world has a very short memory for suffering that isn't its own.

My name is Eddie. At least, I'm fairly certain it's Eddie. It was Eddie for the better part of forty-three years, and I see no compelling reason to let a little thing like recent events rob me of my own name. I bring this up because names matter out here in the woods, where we have so little else. Out here, a name is one of the few things a man can hold onto, assuming his fingers cooperate, which mine increasingly do not.

I would like to tell you our story. Not because I expect sympathy—we gave up on sympathy sometime around the third week—but because someone ought to record what has happened to my people. We have been driven from our homes. We have been chased through the streets of the only town we ever knew. We have been shot at, set upon, tormented, and generally treated as though we were something less than the good and decent citizens we have always tried to be. And every single day, without fail, more of us arrive in the forest to join our little community. You would think a town that hated us so much would be glad to see us go. Instead, they keep making more of us. It's a puzzle I've turned over many times in what remains of my mind.

Let me start at the beginning, or as close to the beginning as I can manage. My memory isn't what it used to be. Very little of me is what it used to be, if I'm being honest, but the memory is the part that inconveniences me most during storytelling.

Millwood was a lovely town. I loved Millwood. I paid my taxes in Millwood. I mowed my modest lawn in Millwood, and I waved to my neighbors every morning as I walked to my job at the hardware store, where I spent twenty years helping people find the right size of screw for whatever it was they were trying to hold together.

I was, by any reasonable measure, a pillar of the community. Not a load-bearing pillar, perhaps. More of a decorative pillar but with really cool designs on it.

Then came the change. I won't bore you with the medical details, partly because I don’t understand it fully myself. One moment you're a respected hardware professional with a mild fever, and the next you're waking up on the floor of your kitchen with an unusual craving and a distinct sense that something fundamental has shifted.

I'll admit the first few days were an adjustment. My wife noticed before I did, which is often the way with wives. She said I seemed "off" but she also said the same thing after I watched my team lose the Super Bowl yet again. She said I was pale, that I was walking weird, that I had stopped responding to conversation with anything more sophisticated than a low moan. I told her, or tried to tell her, that a man is entitled to have an off week now and then. It came out as a moan and let me tell you, she did not take it well.

Looking back, I can see how the misunderstandings began to accumulate. When I reached for her affectionately at breakfast, she interpreted this as a lunge. When I expressed my enduring love, it emerged as a guttural groan and a small amount of drooling. Communication, which had never been the strong suit of our marriage, broke down entirely. She left to stay with her sister, and I have not seen her since, though I think of her often, particularly around dinnertime.

The neighbors were the next to turn against me. I say "turn against," though my therapist—back when I had a therapist—would have encouraged me to consider their perspective. Fine. I'll consider it.

From their perspective, a man they had known for two decades had suddenly begun standing motionless in his front yard at three in the morning, staring at their windows with his head tilted at an angle that no healthy neck should permit. From their perspective, I had stopped collecting my mail and started collecting something else, which I will not describe here out of respect for the more sensitive reader. From their perspective, I had become, in the words of Ms. Pingel next door, "a real property-value concern."

I concede these points. I do. But is that any reason to call the authorities? Is that any reason to gather on the sidewalk with torches, which I would like to point out is an astonishingly medieval response for a suburb with a Starbucks? I mean, do people just have torches laying around for just such an occasion? We had a neighborhood watch. We had a group text. Surely a group text would have sufficed. "Hey Eddie, noticing some changes, everything okay?" That's all it would have taken. Instead: we got torches.

The night they came for me is not a night I enjoy recalling, though recalling anything is a chore these days, so perhaps I shouldn't complain. They surrounded my house. Someone threw a rock through my window, which I found needlessly aggressive because I have a Ring doorbell. I did what any reasonable man would do under the circumstances. I went outside to explain myself.

This, apparently, was the wrong move. The screaming that followed was truly disproportionate. You would have thought I had done something threatening, rather than simply walking toward a crowd of people with my arms outstretched, moaning, and dragging one uncooperative leg behind me. I only wanted to talk, and unfortunately, due to my condition, moans were the closest things my remaining vocabulary could reach for.

I chased them—no, "chased" is too strong. I followed them. Enthusiastically. At a speed that felt, from the inside, quite brisk, though I'm told it appeared to observers as a kind of determined lurching. But my leg had really been bothering me and my body just felt stiff due to my recent medical predicament.

They ran me out. That's the plain truth of it. When a man is chased from his own home by a mob wielding garden implements and at least one hunting rifle, there is only one place left for him to go, and that place is the woods.

The woods were not my first choice. The woods were, in fact, quite low on my list of preferred residences, ranking somewhere below "my house" and slightly above "the bottom of the reservoir." But beggars cannot be choosers. I shuffled out past the town limits, past the sign that reads WELCOME TO MILLWOOD: A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE—and I did note the irony, insofar as I am still capable of noting things—and I entered the tree line, and I began my new existence as one of the displaced.

I was not alone for long. That's the remarkable thing about our community. You are never alone in the woods for long.

The first fellow I encountered was named Dennis. Dennis had been a dentist. He appreciated the symmetry of this, or would have, if appreciation were still within his emotional range. He had been driven out of Millwood two days after me, for reasons he communicated through a series of moans which I surprisingly understood all of.

Dennis and I formed the nucleus of what would become our society. We didn't talk much. We didn't need to. There is a profound understanding between two men who have both been chased across a Dollar General parking lot by their former neighbors. We simply stood together in a small clearing, swaying gently, and waited to see who else the town would send us.

They came. Oh, how they came.

Every day brought new arrivals to our clearing. Every single day, without exception, someone new would stumble out of the tree line, pale and shuffling and freshly rejected by the world of the living. Sometimes they arrived in ones and twos. Sometimes they arrived in whole clusters, as though the town had experienced a particularly bad week and decided to export the overflow all at once.

I began to keep a mental count, though mentally anything is difficult for me now. In the first week, we numbered perhaps a dozen. By the second week, several dozen. By the end of the month, our little community in the woods had swelled to a population that almost rivaled Millwood itself. There was Brenda, who had run the art school. There was Coach Jon, who still wore his whistle, though he had long since forgotten what it was for and mostly just gnawed on it. There was the entire staff of the DMV, who arrived together one Tuesday, moving in the same slow and joyless manner they had exhibited everyday, so that frankly it was hard to tell the difference.

I found myself moved by our growth. Here we were, the unwanted, the cast-out, building something together in the wilderness. A community. A society of the shuffling. We had no laws, no commerce, no language beyond the moan, and no goals beyond a single shared and overpowering hunger that none of us could quite articulate—but we had each other, and in these difficult times, that seemed to count for something.

It did puzzle me, though. It puzzled me deeply. If the good people of Millwood wanted us gone so badly, why did they keep producing more of us? Every torch-lit night, every frantic chase through the streets, seemed to end not with fewer of my kind but with more. It was as though the very act of fighting us was multiplying us. I would watch a new arrival emerge from the trees, still wearing the tattered remains of a Millwood Fire Department uniform, and I would think: they sent us their firefighter. They are running out of firefighters and they are still using torches. Surely someone in that town has noticed the irony in that.

But if I have made our exile sound peaceful, I have misled you. It was not peaceful. The town would not leave us be.

They came into the woods after us. This is what I find hardest to forgive. It was not enough to drive us from our homes; they had to pursue us into our new one. Men would arrive at the edge of the forest in trucks, carrying rifles and wearing bright orange vests, and they would hunt us. Hunt us! As though we were animals. As though we were a nuisance to be managed rather than a persecuted people to be understood.

The small cruelties added up fastest. Dennis took a shot to the shoulder in the third week and lost the arm entirely, though to his credit he adapted quickly and barely seemed to notice the difference. Coach Jon lost a foot to a particularly enthusiastic gentleman with a shotgun, and now gets around by dragging himself along the forest floor, whistle still clenched in his teeth, which has not dampened his spirit in the slightest, or what remains of it. Even the DMV contingent took losses, though it was difficult, in their case, to determine where the injuries ended and the general demeanor of a DMV employee began. Am I right?

Brenda tried to keep our spirits up by hosting game nights for us. Unfortunately, our creativity was hampered by our shared condition. Who would have thought that teaching people to play Magic the Gathering would be so complicated?

Over the course of the next few weeks, I had been shot for no reason on numerous occasions. I have grown almost philosophical about it. A bullet to the chest, once the great terror of any man's life, now registers to me as little more than a firm tap and a slight loss of structural integrity. I keep walking. That is the one thing this town has never understood about us: we do not stop. You can chase us, and we keep coming. You can shoot us, and we keep coming. We are persistent people. Persistence is, perhaps, our defining virtue and our only remaining hobby besides bird watching.

The cruelty of it wore on me. I would lie awake at night—though I no longer sleep, so really I would simply lie there, staring at the canopy—and I would wonder what we had done to deserve such treatment. We only wanted to live. Or, technically, to continue to exist in peace. We only wanted to be near the townspeople. To be close to them. To hold them. To—

Well, I suppose I should be honest with you now, since we've come this far together.

I've been telling this story from my own perspective, which is the only perspective I have. And from my perspective, we are a gentle and misunderstood people, driven from our homes by an irrational and violent mob who all own multiple torches for unknown reasons for no crime greater than being a little different.

But I am not a fool. Whatever else has rotted away, some small stubborn nugget of self-awareness remains lodged in my skull, rattling around next to the hunger, and it compels me to acknowledge a few facts that I have perhaps been arranging in the most flattering possible order.

When I said I wanted to "talk" to my neighbors, and reached toward them with outstretched arms, I may have neglected to mention my intentions once I reached them. When I described "following" the townspeople through the streets, I may have greatly understated the degree to which my following had a culinary dimension to it. When I lamented that the town kept "producing more of us," I may have skipped past the mechanism by which that production occurs, which is, in the plainest terms available to me: we bite them, and then they join us.

That is why our numbers keep growing. That is why every torch-lit night ends with more of my kind and not fewer. It is not that the town is failing to fight us off. It is that every person we catch becomes one of us. The firefighter, the coach, the art school teacher, the entire staff of the DMV—we did not simply find them wandering into the woods, forlorn and rejected. We made them. One by one, with our teeth.

The men in the orange vests are not tormentors. They are the last living residents of Millwood, and they are shooting us because we are, at this very moment, actively trying to eat them. When I described being "shot for no reason," the reason was standing right there, moaning, with its arms out and its jaw working. To quote the great poet Taylor Swift “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it's me.”

We are not refugees. We are not a persecuted minority. We are not misunderstood people building a hopeful community in the wilderness.

We are zombies.

I am a zombie. I have been a zombie this entire time. The shuffling, the moaning, the detached fingers, the overpowering and unarticulated hunger.. They are simply what it is to be dead and hungry and dressed in the ruins of a hardware store polo shirt.

I would apologize for the deception, but in fairness, I deceived myself first and most thoroughly. It is remarkably easy to see yourself as the victim of a story in which you are, in point of fact, the monster. I suspect I am not the only one who has ever made that mistake, though I may be the only one making it while missing an ear.

So here we remain, out in the woods beyond Millwood, and our numbers grow daily, because we keep venturing back into town to "recruit," which is a nicer ring to it than the accurate word. The living grow fewer, and we grow stronger.

I still think about my wife sometimes, at her sister's still perhaps. I think about the person who will be the last living resident of Millwood, whoever he turns out to be, and what he will see when he looks out at us swaying in our clearing, and whether he will understand, in his last moments as himself, that he is not looking at victims at all.

I don't know why I've told you any of this. Confession, maybe. A last flicker of the man who helped strangers find the right screw and waved to his neighbors every morning. That man would have wanted the record set straight, even the parts of the record that indict him. I feel whatever used to remain of Eddie is fading. More monster and less man.

Before I fade completely, let me leave you with this. If you are reading this, and you are still alive, I have one last piece of advice, offered with whatever warmth a dead man can summon: do not come into the woods looking for us. Do not try to understand us. Do not, whatever you do, reach out a hand in sympathy. Because if you do, we will only bit…bi...b….*inaudible moans*.