The Old Undead Treatment

Darryl walks the streets like everyone is a zombie. It's nothing personal. He isn't trying to take away any one's personality. He's agoraphobic,but you wouldn't be able to tell it by the way he power walks the streets. He began working with a therapist 14 months back. Fearing a panic attack from braving the streets to go to some one's office, Darryl picked Dona Gerald out of the yellow pages. Her ad was a bit more dial-in psychic hot line or local singles part line, but it was the only one offering phone services.

After the first call, Darryl began to wonder about Dona's credentials. She asked him about his youth like any psychiatrist would, but focused more on his preferences in movies and entertainment. When he admitted to be an old horror movie buff, she jumped at the chance to talk about herself. By the end of the 30 minute conversation, Darryl felt like he was working her through her lost childhood instead of getting his own help. By the third call, it all began to make more sense.

Dona explained that her theory on agoraphobia was that sufferers feared having panic attacks over nothing. Her idea was to try and validate the panic and teach people to work through it. Given Darryl's fondness of old monster movies, she asked him if he was a fan of zombie flicks. He was. She asked how he felt about the new remakes of the old Night of the Living dead series of films. Darryl said he could see how giving the zombies more intelligence and quicker movements made them a more serious threat, but he had grown up loving the idea of an never ending swarm of undead creatures that only thought about eating brains and moved at a snail's pace. The only real threat there was if you didn't move fast enough or backed yourself into a corner.

By the end of the fourth call, Dona tasked Darryl with going out to the store. She didn't want him to go with any list in mind. She only wanted him to go there and complete an exercise. The exercise was to enter the store knowing that only the cashiers, butchers and bag boys were real people, but everyone else shopping was a brainless, undead creature trying to relive past moments in life grasping at life. Darryl was to take a shopping cart and get down every aisle and back out without alerting the undead that he was living.

The goal was to mimic the people in the store and move cautiously around the store. Darryl began at the front door feeling nervous about the experiment, but once he entered the store, his fear transitioned to an imperative task of staying alive. He stood by the front doors avoiding the people entering and watching the cashiers. They greeted the oozing fleshed mother of three warmly and took the coupons from her hand as the maggots crawled to the conveyor belt. The cashier did not notice. She merely swiped each item across the scanner and helped the bag boy place the items into bags. Very little eye contact was made and, at the end of the transaction, the cashier continued on as if the last person had not even been there and the next was not shuffling along on a bloody stump of a leg.

Darryl felt slightly exhilarated by the task and went for the carts. He waited for the couple that just entered to pull their cart and tried not to notice as the wife grabbed her husband's butt with a 2 fingered hand. Once in the clear, Darryl grabbed a cart and worked his way into produce. He rushed at first nearly crashing into the meat counter and causing a number of shoppers to stare at him. Fearing he was about to become a meal, he stopped and stood still staring at the beets. No one cares about beets as much as Darryl appeared to at the moment, but it seemed to work.

He began working his way past the onions and into the busier tomato row. He followed slowly behind an elderly man picking up each vine ripened tomato as if they were precious diamonds and he was going to find the perfect one. At one point in his appraisal, the man glanced back at Darryl realizing he was being watched. Darryl rolled his eyes to the sides of his skull and began a low moan hoping to convince the old man that he too was of the not living anymore. This startled the man into taking off with his cart, but it also brought more attention onto Darryl. Don't act like a zombie, just act like a person shopping, he thought to himself.

The rest of the experience was rather uneventful. He passed by the dairy section without a second thought about the shredded cheese he needed for his nightly nachos. He passed through the candy aisle like a mine field trying his best not to bump any other shoppers and passed by the bags of sweettarts he would have loved to have for his mid-day snacks. By the end of his non-shopping shopping trip, Darryl was exhausted. It wasn't until he dropped onto his couch back home that he realized he hadn't freaked out during his trip once.

He began taking larger and larger trips into public gradually gaining confidence. Walking down the sidewalk on a busy street was more difficult than the grocery store task, but he learned to handle it. While walking behind people moving slowly, he would power walk so he could move past them gradually with a sidelong glance at the last moment before completely passing the person to make sure he wasn't about to be bitten. He kept himself from a panicked run by reminding himself that drastic actions make him stand out in a world full of cannibals and he didn't want to be the special of the day.

After 3 weeks of confident journeys on the street, Darryl called Dona to thank her for her help during her off hours and to tell her he wouldn't be needing her help anymore. She thanked him and confessed that he was her first successful test of her theory and that others had not fared so well. She told Darryl that he had renewed her confidence in ideas and that she would continue to use her new methods. She already had a new patient who used to love to jog before being trapped in an elevator when his office building caught on fire. He hadn't been comfortable in the world ever since, but she had him out running last weekend. Without a pause Darryl knew she was working with his sister's neighbor five blocks away. Darryl had seen him out for a run on Saturday. He had bulbs of garlic pinned to his t-shirt.