The Making of Zombie Wars Read online

  Her lease was up next month, Kimmy said, and they could sign a new one together. They would split the rent and he would pay her back half of the deposit she had already put up and this—she made another demonstrative circle, and the wine swirled again inside her glass—would be the home they share. The whorling moves were wholly disorienting, as if she were working to mesmerize him.

  He applied the tip of his forefinger to his lips in a gesture of serious contemplation, and he could still smell Ana’s skin on it. Kimmy noticed his empty glass and positioned the mouth of the bottle over it for him to approve replenishment. Joshua admired her determination, her ability to be perpetually goal-oriented—she was everything he wasn’t, a smart woman included. If there had been such a thing as a perfect self-betterment instruction sheet, she would have checked off every item on the list. She was one hairbreadth away from self-completion.

  “I don’t want anything to change,” she said. “I just want more of it.”

  Joshua nodded, and she emptied the bottle into his glass. Whatever beast was in the oven now reached the early stages of incineration. He’d thought that she knew more than he simply from being less disorganized; he’d believed she must be seeing in him something he had no access to. Perhaps it was his inchoate quality that she liked—he was incomplete: a Joshua without Joshua, a thinker without thinking. But if she couldn’t tell that he was drunk after he’d groped another woman, if she couldn’t see the sludge of lechery at the bottom of his alcohol-red eyes, then she couldn’t anticipate the forms he would assume upon completion. Which is to say that Ms. Perfect wasn’t that perfect, and Joshua stood a reasonable chance. They could, then, perhaps, manage to move on to the next level in the relationship game, the cock ring set to be the transitional object this time around. He would have to be responsible and productive, she would have to be forgiving and understanding; they could keep their secrets and work on the practicalities of common life. Ana would remain obscure in the before, while in the after he and Kimmy would be progressing toward the peaceful domain of grown-up commitment, whose denizens regularly read the Sunday New York Times before a brunch with friends and, if need be, nursed each other through grueling chemo. Here was Joshua, then, at the mouth of the fear booth; he could back out or step in. He offered her his glass for a chin-chin and she touched it with hers.

  Joshua followed Kimmy upstairs and put his wineglass on the nightstand. But he never got to drink any more of it, as she expertly handcuffed him to the bedposts, then got on top of him. She bit his nipples; she sucked him while she fingered him to tickle the prostate—hopefully liquidating the evil cell—stopping as soon as she interpreted Joshua’s shudder as the harbinger of ejaculation; she ignored the handcuffs cutting into his wrists. She uttered no word; after she came, she closed her eyes and closed they stayed. Bushy, perversely contorted on the dresser, licked his own asshole throughout the whole session.

  Script Idea #69: An S&M male porn star falls in love with a gentle poetry professor. When she is kidnapped by his jealous fan, he needs not only to save her but also to tell her the truth about his life. It turns out she loves to dominate. Title: These Chains of Love.

  EXT. NAVY PIER — NIGHT

  Guarded by soldiers with night-vision goggles, a column of seven prisoners stumbles down the desolate Navy Pier. The prisoners’ heads are covered with black hoods. Abandoned cruise ships, the Ferris wheel broken in half. The only sounds are the WAVES, the HOWLING of empty cruise ships, and WHIMPERING under the hoods. The soldiers have powerful guns but keep the prisoners in line with cattle prods, which cause sparks and make bodies twitch. They make them line up at the edge of the pier, facing the water. One of the prisoners tries to break away from the gang but is prodded back into line. Each of the soldiers points a gun at a hooded head.

  PRISONER

  (with a foreign accent)

  I am not dead! I am not dead!

  The soldiers fire. The flashing guns light up the exploding hoods.

  SOLDIER

  Now you are!

  The soldiers chuckle as the bodies SPLASH in the water. On the horizon, smudges of dawn. All over downtown Chicago flicker the pyres incinerating zombie corpses.

  The woman on the other side of Clark had Ana’s shape, her gait. Joshua nearly got run over by a car as he crossed to enter her wake. He wasn’t really sure it was Ana—the hair was different, undyed and longer—but he could still stand to watch the woman’s hips swing: she wore a tight skirt and boots. If it was Ana, miraculously transformed, he’d cover her eyes with his hands from behind and make her guess the surpriser. But when the woman turned and exposed all her incontestable dissimilarities, Joshua, like an experienced stalker, slipped into the Coffee Shoppe. He needed some coffee, he decided retroactively.

  Coffee in hand, he tried to sneak past Stagger’s door, emblazoned with a Cubs Fans Only parking sign. But it flew open the moment the first stair creaked; a soundslide of Guns N’ Roses washed over Joshua. Stagger emerged bare-chested, with sinews, bones, and muscles on full and elaborate display; his was the body of a junkie marathon runner. His ponytail was loosened so that his face was parenthesized by hair, streaked with gray here and there. He sported two shiny studs through his nipples, and, between them, a tattoo of a snake whose tail’s tip touched his navel. No doubt somewhere within his domain he had a treasure chest full of cock rings and handcuffs, and many more things unimaginable. Joshua unhurriedly ascended onto the next creaking step. He was scared of Stagger and his nipple-studded intensity, but he didn’t want to look like a coward and run up.

  “Would you care to come in?” Stagger said, in a voice that only he could’ve thought alluring. “We could hang out, suck on, you know, some beer.”

  “Come on, Stagger,” Joshua said, not looking at Stagger. “Jesus!”

  “Leave Jesus out of this,” Stagger said. “I ask you respectfully.” He stepped back heels first into his dark den and closed the door. Relieved, Joshua proceeded upstairs through a tide of creaks, listening to what sounded like bottles being smashed to the beat of “Paradise City.” What was troubling was not so much the noise as that Stagger kept going. How many bottles for smashing could he possibly have in that place? Every little castle in the kingdom of Chicagoland includes a TV, fridge, and stacked crates of refined insanity.

  Joshua’s back was tense, his loins elongated to the point of pain, his shoulders painful from the burden of the last couple of days. A sensation of a noose around his neck, stretching it, providing relief as he hung from the ceiling, emerged in his mind. He looked up to see if there was a hook above the stairs where a belt could be attached, but there was none.

  His place was exactly as he’d left it: mouse-gray dust clumps patrolling the corners; the piss-sticky bathroom floor; the hunt picture slanted, the fox heading downhill. The books stood on the shelves; the two chairs facing the table like reprimanded children; the unwashed cereal bowls still unwashed; the oriental chimes not orientally chiming. How stable everything was when he wasn’t there! Everything remained in its place until he moved it. Unless, that is, Stagger haunted it in his absence, pawing his stuff, then returning it exactly where it had been.

  Kimiko had visited his place (home?) only once or twice. She couldn’t abide the moldy shower curtain, the cockroach families vacationing in the kitchen, the flatulent reek of singlehood infusing everything. She may have initially found it exotic—an endearing symptom of Jo’s prolonged youth, perhaps; a recognizable point on this little patient’s trajectory, something she could work with. It had become obvious quickly that she couldn’t be turned on within the walls of this dystopic dorm-room replica. Joshua hadn’t insisted; he’d been pretty content to spend nights (and many long days) at her place. That way he’d practice being fully adult while retaining an escape tunnel into his prolonged adolescence; that way everything here could enjoy its comfortable stasis. Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in
the museum of the self.

  When Kimmy was gone for a conference in Orlando or some such hotel-and-Enrique-friendly place, Joshua would spend days writing at his abode, leaving it only for work and movie rentals. Back when he’d been a true adolescent, with Janet acing it in college and his still-married parents frequently absconding to Michigan for a weekend with the Blunts, he’d liked to stay at home by himself. He wouldn’t go out, wouldn’t invite his friends over, wouldn’t wash dishes or shower—he’d just read, drink, watch movies, and masturbate. It was bachelor-pad communism: producing according to one’s abilities, consuming according to one’s needs, but no commune to get on your nerves. Come Saturday night, he’d reach a utopia of abandon, a delightful blankness of mind that eradicated the outside world in all its unrewarding complications. He’d clean up the place only a couple of hours before his parents’ return. At least once, the outside world had barged in unexpectedly, Bernie returning too soon, catching him naked and deeply invested in porn. Months of indulgent therapy would follow.

  He should call Bernie again, he recognized. If he called him now, he wouldn’t mention his prostate; he would simply tell him he was moving in with Kimmy; that would make him happy, maybe help him forget his cancer for a little bit. Then again, Bernie was long-winded, even when he was not terrified of dying. Besides, what could Joshua actually tell him? Everything will be okay? Maybe it would be better if he called Connie to tell her about his father’s prostate goyter, maybe she’d take enough pity on Bernie to take care of him. Or he could call Janet, she’d know what to do.

  Joshua put his coffee down and straightened the fox-hunt picture. There was no sense in cleaning this mess up. A better man would say goodbye to this disarray, to this life of entropy. It was time perhaps to fully join the adult world, take responsibilities, assist his father in need, be worthy of a grown-up woman. The fact was, there was little he wanted from this place (home? nah!), except maybe some clean underwear. If somehow all this were to burn down, he’d experience no feeling of loss whatsoever; on the contrary, it would be a kind of purging. The great American cycle: catastrophe prompting reinvention; reinvention resulting in further catastrophe, and on we roll toward apocalypse and redemption. Script Idea #99: A foxhunt from the fox’s point of view.

  In his bedroom, his underwear was washed and folded on his bed in a neat, unfamiliar stack. And there, next to it, was Ana, her legs crossed, her fingers entangled on her knee, wagging impatiently her shoe on the tip of her foot. She looked like she’d been waiting for him for a long time, ripening.

  “I brought your wallet,” she said. “Mr. Stagger opened door for me. He is funny.”

  “Funny is not the right word,” Joshua said.

  She wore a white shirt with leg-of-mutton sleeves; there were chocolate smudges on her collar and her chest, even on her cuffs. The hem of her skirt cut across the globes of her knees; he could smell her, her anabashed arousal. She unzipped her purse and dug through it until she excavated his wallet. It was different, as if it had aged and become archaeological; Joshua remembered his wallet being light, but now it emitted darkness in the bedroom’s gloom. He took it and held it, deliberating whether to check if all of his cards were there. He could now prove again he was his legal self, so he decided to show that he trusted her. Stagger was still destroying “Paradise City” downstairs, but she either didn’t hear or didn’t care. Or it wasn’t happening at all. What if he were the only one hearing it, if it were all taking place in his head?

  “See if wallet is okay,” she said. “I never trust Esko.”

  The card catalogue of his life: library card, video-store card, credit cards, long over limit and now canceled; wine-shoppe punch card; driver’s license—the face on it appeared only vaguely familiar, as if belonging to a younger distant cousin with an overbite suggesting learning disabilities. There was no confusion, no sign of interiority in that face, nothing he could connect with the intricacies of his present self. I skip like a pebble across the surface of time, until I reach the first Tuesday of my new life.

  “He don’t know I’m here,” Ana said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Worry about what?” Joshua asked. It was an inane question, both insufficient and redundant. Ana smiled and bit her upper lip, as if preventing herself from answering. The flesh of her lips, the shimmering softness in the creases. It was too dark to see, yet he saw it all. His penis stirred and then began transmogrifying into a full-fledged cock.

  “We would be making a terrible mistake,” Joshua said.

  “Passion is never mistake,” she said. Here he was at a crossroads: he could follow this living woman, let his body respond to all the stimuli she emitted; or he could honorably go the other way and return to Kimmy, who had done things to him last night he’d want done again.

  “Passion is a fragrance brand,” Joshua said. He squeezed by Ana to get to the closet. He dug out a New Balance duffel bag he used to use when he used to go to the gym.

  “You will be going somewhere?” she asked.

  “I’m moving in with my girlfriend.” My girlfriend. There had been a time—many times—when he’d lied about having a girlfriend. He’d lied to Jessica in college, claiming that Jennifer had been his girlfriend, and then he’d lied the other way around. He’d bragged to a number of fellow guys about the outrageous things his nonexistent girlfriend would happily do for him in bed. In pursuit of his parents’ respect, he’d misrepresented his relationship situation. Even when he’d had actual girlfriends he felt he’d been lying. It could well be that no man can say my girlfriend or—come to think of it—my wife without lying through his teeth. Still, after last night’s heart-to-heart and the subsequent genitals-to-genitals, it was hard to deny that Kimmy had unimpeachably acquired the status of his official girlfriend.

  “Very nice,” Ana said. He could detect no sarcasm or sadness in her voice. “I will have been happy for you.”

  “Thank you,” Joshua said, cleaning out his socks drawer. He felt Ana’s hand on his thigh, tugging him back with the slightest of forces. He dropped the duffel bag and sat back on the bed next to her. There was surely a way out of this, but she took his hand and examined the moons of his nails, caressing the underside of his knuckles. The bottle-smashing downstairs stopped, and then Axl Rose shut up; Joshua pricked up his ears in expectation of more, but it remained quiet, as if Stagger was waiting to see what would happen upstairs.

  “My father has prostate cancer,” Joshua wanted to say, but didn’t. Now everything mattered less, but also more.

  By the time I’m sixty-five, I’ll have lived for a very long time. She slid her leg over his and pulled him in toward her. Her dimples had a penchant for appearing at exactly the right moment. Too distraught to look her in the eye, he put his hand on her knee, then pushed her skirt up. It turned out she wore no underwear. He who provides food to all flesh, everlasting is His loving kindness.

  When she was on top of him, the immobile ceiling fan distracted him. There was a hook next to it, as if conveniently installed for his hanging. He closed his eyes and heard thuds coming from below, either Stagger hitting his ceiling to let them know he was privy to it all or playing drums on his furniture. I don’t want anything to change. I just want more of it. He felt weighty, his muscles laden with arousal; he did what he had to do. Ana whispered obscenely Bosnian words into his ear, pushing him deeper in, and deeper in he went until his cock’s forehead was slamming against her interior walls. A very small man hunched in the crawl space of his mind, itemizing the moment, as if collecting evidence of his commitment to this experience: her wetness; the mutual thrust of their hips; the underwear scattered on the floor; her coat hanging in his closet; the bedside lamp tottering to the edge; the adult ecstasy of it all. She sneezed as she was coming and he actually said: “Bless you.” And blessed she was.

  They shared a pair of his clean anchor-patterned shorts to wipe themselves off. Ana sat up to deposit her breasts in her bra, locking it skillfully in the back. Naked and co
ld under the sheet, Joshua watched the care and ease with which she resumed her shape, rubbing her back idiotically as if to encourage her. The lust always exceeds the act it leads to, as does the memory of it. Her breasts seemed larger when packed than when she was naked. Now what?

  “We have to stop doing this,” he said. “You have a husband.”

  “I don’t care about husband. He is wild,” she said, putting on her chocolate-smudged shirt.

  “I have a girlfriend,” he said. “Who wants to live with me.”

  “I have my daughter,” she said. He pushed her sleeves up, because there was nothing else to do, and caressed her forearm with his knuckles. He liked her, he realized. Pity this was the only thing they could do. She leaned in to kiss him. Her lips had a Bosnian taste, like some food he’d had at her party. Lamb, perhaps? For a moment, he couldn’t recognize his room or remember what was just outside it. Everything outside the limelight of now is swallowed by the darkness of elsewhere.

  “I don’t want to be responsible for your child’s unhappiness,” he said. In truth, he didn’t care all that much. He hadn’t really cared when Rachel had discovered that Bernie had had a titty mistress for years—by that time it had become too late to give a damn. When he’d eventually met Connie, he could see why Bernie wanted to screw her every day, all day long.

  “Everybody has unhappiness,” Ana said. “What is life without no unhappiness?”

  “A life without unhappiness is a happy life. It’s a warm blanket,” Joshua said. “That’s what it is. What we all want.”

  “There is no such life like that,” Ana said. Her eyes were crazy green; and there was the way her lips worked together and lightly parted to produce a soft consonant (suCH). “Nobody has life like that.”