Time Burial

Tonight I would like to talk about a short story I recently read.  It's called "Time Burial" by Howard Wandrei and is compiled in a book of the same title by the same author.  I believe it was written in the 1930s and as such is not specifically labeled as about zombies but gives some zombie feel nonetheless. 

It's about a guy who finds an immortality serum while searching for a cure for the common cold.  This serum keeps him free from disease and allows him to not age in perpetuity as long as he drinks a bit of the concoction every few weeks. 
SPOILER ALERT

Without getting into too many non-zombie details I'll say that this guy lives for over 2000 years on this serum and only tells one person about it in that entire time (which is in the beginning of the story).  In these 2000 years he never ages a day and never even catches the sniffles; he never needs to sleep or eat, either.  There are down sides though, one of which is that anything he eats never leaves his body so he just gains the weight of everything he ingests pound for pound (I'm also guessing that that would mean he couldn't drink much booze either). Also, his heart has slowed to the point where his circulation is so low that his skin is cold to the touch.  He also lives a transient life so nobody will ever find out that he's immortal.  In the end he runs out of the key ingredient for the serum and fails to buy more before he needs to; he dies and ends up as chalk, falling away onto the floor as nothing.

What I find interesting about this is that he has almost no pulse and needs to neither sleep nor eat.  These are reasons why I think of him as a kind of zombie.  Granted, not a Romero style, brain eating zombie nor a single minded, goal serving voodoo zombie.  But he does seem to me to be a kind of chemically induced zombie, one who's only real mission is to serve his own serum.  He never allows himself to love or to ever truly live because he's too afraid of others finding out about the serum.  He must always end up drinking it for the risk of death, almost in the same way that a Romero zombie lusts after brains.  He needs neither food nor sleep, both hallmarks of zombies whom may strike at any time or may horde around holed-up humans for months on end.
Really the only difference between the man in this story and a traditional zombie is that this man is seemingly rational and cognizant.  He actively makes the decisions that enslave him.
The biggest reason, though, why I think of him as a zombie is that the way the story is written insinuates that he loses his soul to this serum.  In my mind this is what separates men from zombies: a soul.  If, as I think, the man in the story chooses to give his body and soul to this serum, then he truly is a zombie.  But if not, then perhaps he's just a wayward man, lost in his own creation.


Bottom line: not a bad book, this particular story is pretty good.  I consider the main character to be a cognizant, chemically induced zombie who chose to become what he did.