“I used to lie in bed in my flat and imagine what would happen if there was a zombie attack.”
– Simon Pegg, actor and comedian
MY wife was sleeping peacefully beside me.
Down the hall, the children dozed too – no stomach aches or weird nightmares that night.
But I couldn’t sleep.
I stared at the ceiling, head full of screeching zombies and blown-out cities.
‘The Last of Us’, the HBO series about a fungus that turns people into zombies, based on a video game, returned for its second season last month.
I had been unwell ever since.
Each episode had left me sleeping badly and haunted while awake, dreading the next Sunday, when I would have to sit down in front of my TV and do it all again.
I spent the 57 unbearable minutes of the Season 2 finale gripping, alternately, my wife and the giant cushion that typically formed the back of our couch, occasionally screaming variations of “Oh, s*it”, “No” and “Ugh”.
I knew that in the two years since I survived Season 1, there must have been many months when I had lived a normal life – not contemplating zombies at all, much less the apocalyptic potential of mushrooms.
And yet, with the show now back, I could not fathom how exactly that had worked – especially when I thought about all the places the kids and I had followed my wife through her clinical research on gastrointestinal fungi.
(I had captured the journey briefly in ‘Refused to be either’, dated April 26.)
If you saw me around – cheering enthusiastically at my son’s football game, making small talk at the potluck barbecue – know that inside, I was barely holding it together.
“Why don’t you just stop watching?” you ask.
So do my friends, my family, the waitress who had the unfortunate responsibility of explaining a mushroom dish to me recently.
It’s a great question and one I’ve asked myself daily since mid-April.
Why am I, a busy father of three whose other interests include analysing markets and building models, so obsessed with a show that is clearly torturing me?
I’ve come to the unfortunate realisation that the torture might be the point.
There’s no better distraction from whatever currently ails you than, well, something worse.
I could use some distraction these days.
When I’m thinking about the zombie apocalypse, I am not thinking about the kind-of-sort-of-possibly apocalyptic things that are really taking place in 2025.
My brain just can’t do both things at once.
So while I salute all of you out there doing the hard work to make change in our actual world, I guess I choose the zombies.
We watch them – or some other terrible, fictional creature – on the screen, and we’re swallowed whole into another world.
What makes that measured amplification curious is the inherent limitations of the zombie itself: You can’t add much depth to a creature who can’t talk, doesn’t think and whose only motive is the consumption of flesh.
You can’t humanise a zombie, unless you make it less zombie-esque.
There are slow zombies, and there are fast zombies – that’s pretty much the spectrum of zombie diversity.
It’s not that zombies are changing to fit the world’s condition; it’s that the condition of the world seems more like a zombie offensive.
Something about zombies is becoming more intriguing to us.
And I think I know what that something is.
Zombies are just so easy to kill.
When we think critically about monsters, we tend to classify them as personifications of what we fear.
Frankenstein’s monster illustrated our trepidation about untethered science; Godzilla was spawned from the fear of the atomic age; werewolves feed into an instinctual panic over predation and man’s detachment from nature.
Vampires and zombies share an embedded anxiety about disease.
Much of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies.
The task appears straightforward: you blast one in the brain from point-blank range (preferably with a shotgun).
That’s Step 1.
Step 2 is doing the same thing to the next zombie that takes its place.
Step 3 is identical to Step 2, and Step 4 isn’t any different from Step 3.
Repeat this process until (a) you perish, or (b) you run out of zombies.
That’s really the only viable strategy.
Every zombie war is a war of attrition.
It’s always a numbers game.
And it’s more repetitive than complex.
In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning, filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork or following gossip out of obligation or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche.
The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will never be finished with whatever it is you do.
If there’s one thing we all understand about zombie killing, it’s that we’re forced to come right up to the edge of the thing that scares us.
We remind ourselves that it isn’t real, but we think, too: What if it were?
Could we face it?
And how?
Often, we come around to a place where we believe we could.
My wife was first exposed to this approach years ago, when she had a miscarriage.
It was the first truly bad thing that ever happened to her, and she was feeling shattered, bereft.
Some people return to reruns of “The Office” in such a moment or the romantic comedies of their youth.
Her therapist recommended horror movies.
I paused.
Asked again, just to be sure I wasn’t mishearing.
Horror movies?
She did not like blood and guts.
She did not like moments of suspense.
She did not like ‘The Blair Witch Project’ when we saw it together at her house.
Her therapist swore the grisly shock of the genre helped jolt many of her patients out of their circumstances, out of their grief, at least for an hour or two.
She couldn’t bring herself to do it until she landed in the hospital with another pregnancy gone sideways.
I played ‘Get out’ on her laptop and rested it on the edge of the bed.
I remember feeling, strangely, a little lighter as we watched, freed from my questions and worries and heartbreak, intently focused on someone else’s very, very bad day. (Having your girlfriend’s family try to swap your brain – it could always be worse.)
I wish I could get this specific brand of perspective by watching ‘Billions’.
Gamers, preppers and general fans of gore handle such content just fine, but I remain weak.
With ‘The Last of Us’, I’m out of my depth; I lack a proper support system.
I recently tried to steer the conversation in my 16-quants “SEAL Team Six” group chat toward the zombie show.
The response was mostly crickets, save one friend who asked if ‘The Last of Us’ was the one Blake Lively filed a lawsuit over.
That’s the movie ‘It Ends with Us’, based on a romance novel.
Very different vibes, I said.
My kids haven’t been much help, either.
They watched the show unperturbed while eating snacks.
After years of fishing for compliments, I began fishing for comfort.
“A fungal zombie pandemic couldn’t actually happen, right?” I asked my wife before bed.
“In theory,” she said matter-of-factly, turning out the light.
I settled in for another night of staring at the ceiling.
The season finally ended last Sunday.
I felt relief, as if I had been spared by a giant mushroom zombie.
All I had to do was get through those episodes, and then I could move on with my life.
But I admit there’s a tinge of sadness, too.
The real world will surely continue being relentless.
Sooner or later, the workload will have me desperate for another reprieve.
What terrifying alternate reality will I escape to now?
The only thing worse than suffering through a fantasy apocalypse is having to find a new one.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at med.akilis@gmail.com