in a sinister tavern in a housing complex on the outskirts of the city. Of course, each and every one of us at these periodic get-togethers would prefer to be somewhere else, sharing a table and conversation with real beings. If we come without fail it’s only because we have no other alternative. Also, these occasions provide us with the rare opportunity to let our guard down; for a few short hours we’re free of the tension occasioned by having to spend the day pretending to be alive. It’s not friendship that brings us together, or even solidarity, but rather the common misfortune of not being totally dead—or totally alive, as the more optimistic of the zombies prefer to put it. As for me, I confess that sometimes I decide not to go because it seems obvious that my desire to overcome my limitations doesn’t sit well with the others, and they see my plan to discover a remedy for our condition as a sign of arrogance. On the other hand, since I’m the best preserved of the lot, almost all of them either envy or despise me.
The owner of the establishment is one of the oldest zombies around and, certainly, the wisest. His name is Dionisio, and he’s composed of a series of dried-up, dusty parts held together through a complex system of belts, straps, and Velcro that lend his remains a vaguely human semblance. Masked minions place him behind the counter every day at dusk, and there he spends the evening, immobile and ominous, like a symbol, one of those automatons that you activate with a coin in order to obtain a whole cloth prophecy. Dionisio is the only one I can talk to about my aspirations. He doesn’t agree either, but his objections are not the product of petty grudges but rather of a refined skepticism. Our conversations are extremely beneficial because the elegance of his refutations forces me to constantly improve my research approach. I’ll never forget what he said to me the first time I told him about my project.
“Qualia.”
“Qualia?” I asked, intrigued.
“To be dead,” he explained in his gravelly voice, “has grievous consequences. The most obvious, of course, is the slow and distasteful decomposition of the body. In almost every survey done of our population, nine out of ten zombies indicate decomposition as the most troublesome symptom of their condition. They say this because they don’t know, they can’t know, that there’s a worse one: the irreparable loss of qualia.”
I still didn’t understand. If Dionisio had been alive, he would, at that moment, have paused in order to take a long breath and resume his lecture, but, since he was a zombie, he merely paused. Habit, not hope, is the last thing to go.
“In brief, qualia is the living being’s capacity to establish a connection between his experience of the world and the self.”
“Yourself ?”
“No, no, not myself—the self. Let’s see. . . . A living person can understand that the things that happen to him, happen to something that is him, his self, the consciousness of being one’s own self. If he feels joy or sorrow, if he’s overwhelmed by beauty or by danger, he knows that he himself is feeling all of these things in such a way that he perceives the attributes of each.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not,” sentenced Dionisio, “nor will you ever. I won’t either. And this is the best evidence there is that we don’t possess qualia.”
“But then, how . . . ?”
“How can I speak with such authority about something I don’t understand?” he said, cutting me off, then shrugged his shoulders. “I can explain it to you, but they are empty words that I’ve accumulated over the centuries, like someone who can recite perfectly a page written in a language he doesn’t understand.”
“What you haven’t told me is what qualia has to do with my research. Whatever it is, it must not be indispensable. If I’ve gotten this far without it, achieving dead what very few ever achieve alive, it must be a superfluous characteristic, like breathing, which, by the way, I also haven’t missed.”
“That’s where you’re mistaken,” said Dionisio, raising a fleshless phalange. “The quality of a thing is what indicates how that thing will affect you. And that information is crucial in order to make certain decisions and to recognize certain types of results. I’ll admit that you’re an intelligent zombie, the most intelligent I’ve met in a long, long time, but believe me, in order to achieve your goal you’re going to need qualia.”
I changed the subject without too much difficulty, and the evening took its course. I said goodbye quite late, but at the door it occurred to me to ask him one last question.
“Dionisio.”
“Yes.”
“If qualia is as you’ve described it, it seems to me that all of eternity would be insufficient for one of us to comprehend it as well as you have, if I’m to judge from your earlier exposition.”
Dionisio didn’t respond right away. The silence he allowed to grow between my words and his was a sign of reluctance. His face, inscrutable in its state of total decomposition, registered an incomprehensible expression. I stayed put.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. . . . It just occurs to me that, in the same way that you’ve explained it to me today, someone must have explained it to you, once upon a time.”
Dionisio twisted his lips and busied himself squirming under the strap that held his left shoulder in place.
“I was not mistaken when I said you were intelligent,” he murmured, half closing his flashing ocular cavities. He finished fighting against the strap, laid his elbows atop the counter, and nodded his head. “Someone explained it to me. A long time ago . . . Someone who understood it.”
The color red is a neural response to the stimulation of electromagnetic waves upon the retina; in other words, it’s an idea, a figment of the imagination, a label that our brains affix to that part of the visible spectrum that exhibits the wave of greatest longitude. From red to violet, in descending gradation, our brains distinguish ranges according to the distance between the crest of one wave and the next. And in order to separate and indicate the experience of each of these ranges it invents a sensation: orange, yellow, green, blue—the labeling of each as arbitrary as the invention of a word to designate any given object.
A color is, in fact, a word, but a word so indelibly imprinted upon our experience of the real that we cannot imagine that it could be any other way. And yet it could be. . . .
We believe that colors exist in and of themselves, for themselves, but no. Colors, such as we perceive them, don’t really exist. To the longitudinal range that we normally know as red, our biological architecture could have assigned that other optical experience that we call green.
We are capable of perceiving only the most minimal portion of the totality of the electromagnetic spectrum. We call this insignificant segment light. But what strange and indescribable color would x-rays be if we could see them? Or UHF waves? What color would the air surrounding us be if we could detect radio waves? What would the universe look like if we could see cosmic rays, the terrible light that illuminates the extremes of the spectrum beyond ultraviolet rays?
What occurs with colors also occurs with tastes, sounds, textures, smells. Our five senses are not portals through which we are conveyed to an external reality, but rather ports that receive stimuli utterly
