Zombification

Zombification is the story’s deliberately unstable image for people whose identities or desires seem to have been altered: it is invoked to explain Mickey Wolfmann’s transformation, joked about in connection with the Boards, and treated by Doc as a possibility when Shasta returns. The term moves between suspicion, supernatural comedy, and an uneasy question about agency; the book offers no single mechanism that makes every use equivalent.

The suspicion surrounding Mickey Wolfmann

A character looking back to the time Mickey disappeared describes a sudden end to his identity as an “acid-head philanthropist” and concludes that someone did something to him. The accusation remains deliberately unspecific: when asked who was responsible, the speaker answers, “Whoever.” Zombification here is not a confirmed diagnosis or a named procedure, but a fearful explanation for the abrupt contrast between Mickey’s earlier public character and the man who reappears.

The contrast is described through Mickey’s reunion with Sloane Wolfmann. The couple are said to be together again in a honeymoon suite at Caesar’s, where Mickey makes possessive displays in public and Sloane conforms to what the speaker calls a bought-and-sold routine. She avoids eye contact with other men, particularly those she has been seeing. The scene turns a change in intimate behavior into supposed evidence of a larger alteration: the old, free-spirited benefactor is imagined to have become a controlling husband, while Sloane’s compliance makes the relationship look staged or imposed.

The same speaker gives the suspicion a bodily and sexual formulation, saying Mickey has become a “born-again family man” and that whatever was done to his brain also “reprogrammed his dick.” The phrasing is crude and speculative, but it makes the accusation specific: the perceived change is not merely political or social, but reaches desire and sexual conduct. The speaker says Sloane now refuses to give him attention and describes sitting with a rifle across his knees, waiting for Mickey to choose his moment. The image of the armed, already-doomed man at an old silver mine turns jealousy and fear into a grotesque Western tableau; it conveys the speaker’s sense of danger without proving that Mickey is actually preparing an attack. A rumor that Mickey made a deal with the Justice Department further complicates the picture, linking his apparent reinvention to possible institutional power without explaining what happened to him.

The Boards and comic exorcism

Elsewhere, the language shifts from suspicion about a developer to an openly comic exchange about the Boards. Scott says that even Doc thinks the band members are zombies; Doc accepts the label provisionally but jokes that people cannot always blame the undead for their condition. Scott’s reply about a career counselor recommending real estate, followed by a joke about his mother’s co-brokers, makes zombification a punch line about conventional work and the people who seem to inhabit it without vitality. Doc extends the metaphor into a mock medical warning: he advises Scott to examine his mother regularly for bites, since that is how zombification is transmitted.

The joke does not remain a permanent verdict on the band. When Scott later reports seeing Coy again, the conversation turns to how the situation was supposedly fixed. The women in the band could no longer tolerate it, so they pooled their money to hire an exorcist: a Buddhist priest from the Temple downtown. He performed his “thing,” after which the Boards and the house were officially declared dezombified. The band then gave him a maintenance contract for regular psychic perimeter checks. This comic progression—from supernatural affliction to a paid preventive service—makes recovery sound both ritualized and administratively managed. It supplies a resolution within the characters’ account, not an independent explanation of what zombification means or how the exorcism works.

Doc’s uncertainty about Shasta

The possibility returns in a more intimate and unresolved form when Shasta comes back into Doc’s life. Only afterward does Doc remember to look for signs of zombification, wondering whether she had been processed somewhere in the way he believes Mickey was. His immediate impression is that she seems like the same old Shasta, but he does not treat that appearance as conclusive: he considers the possibility that she made a deal to escape Mickey’s fate and wonders who might have been involved and what repayment such an arrangement would demand. The thought preserves the distinction between recognizing a familiar person and knowing what has happened to her.

Before Doc can question her further, Shasta explains that her earlier account of being away on family business concealed what really happened. Two men found her, took her to San Pedro, and put her aboard a boat. She says she did not know their actual plans for her; when the boat reached Maui, she hustled her way off. Her story establishes an abduction and an escape, but it does not establish that she was zombified, that she made a bargain, or that the men were carrying out a plan like the one Doc suspects in Mickey’s case. The gap between the danger Doc imagines and the limited facts Shasta supplies keeps the concept in the realm of anxious inference.

Meaning and limits of the metaphor

Across these scenes, zombification names an apparent loss or redirection of selfhood, but the evidence differs each time. Mickey’s changed public persona and possessive marriage are reported by a suspicious observer; the Boards’ condition is treated as a joke and then said to have been cured by an exorcism; Shasta’s possible processing exists only in Doc’s retrospective worry. Keeping these accounts distinct matters: the narrative does not confirm a single hidden process behind all three, nor does it establish that the metaphor is simply literal supernatural fact.

The term’s comic reach into ordinary professional life sits beside its more threatening use for coercion and altered desire. A career in real estate can be joked about as the sort of life a zombie might lead, while Mickey’s alleged transformation carries the more serious implication that someone has intervened in a person’s mind and intimate conduct. The word therefore makes a familiar social image strange without settling whether the cause is supernatural, institutional, personal, or imagined. Its unresolved movement between a band joke, a story of apparent personality change, and Doc’s suspicion of Shasta mirrors the characters’ broader difficulty distinguishing visible behavior from what may have been done to the person beneath it.