The Making of Zombie Wars Read online

  EXT. ROAD — DAY

  Major Klopstock, Ruth, Cadet, and Boy walk with exhaustion and hunger evident in their strides. Here and there, a burnt vehicle is in a ditch. A huge plume of smoke hovers on the horizon. The waddling shadows of zombies climb up a distant hill toward a lonely house on its top.

  Major K’s crew come upon a cistern truck. The driver’s body at the wheel has clearly been devoured by the ravenous undead, his rib cage wide open and devoid of organs. Major K rummages around the cabin, checks the glove compartment, finding nothing useful. He breaks open the box on the truck’s underside to discover two jerry cans, both empty. He thinks quickly, takes out the jerry cans and gives one to Cadet. First he, then Cadet, climbs the ladder on the cistern toward the hatch at the top, but Cadet’s jerry can CLANGS against the cistern. Everyone freezes: they can clearly hear CLANGING in response from the inside — they exchange glances. Major K clangs again: TWO TIMES LONG, TWO TIMES SHORT. The response: TWO TIMES LONG, TWO TIMES SHORT. Cadet descends, puts the jerry can down and cocks his weapon. Major K pulls out his gun and goes all the way to the hatch.

  MAJOR K

  Hello! Any humans inside?

  He can hear VOICES, but no words. He calls again. Now he distinctly hears words spoken back to him. He reloads the gun.

  MAJOR K

  (to his crew)

  Step back!

  Ruth takes a few steps back, but Cadet gestures toward her to tell her to get as far from the truck as she can and take Boy with her. They move to stand at a distance. Cadet points his weapon at the hatch. Major K unlocks it cautiously, jumps off the cistern, and runs to stand by Cadet. They watch, their weapons ready.

  The hatch opens. One by one, living, filthy people crawl out to be blinded by the sun. It is clear they do not know where they are or what has been happening. The refugees look around, flummoxed. They seem to be a family. PADRE (50) climbs down the ladder.

  PADRE

  ¿Qué está pasando?

  His cheek still hurt; there were still Ana’s teeth marks on it. The shameless complicatedness of it all made him feel exhausted yet mature, as if he’d been initiated into a brutally authentic domain—not a commercial for an idiotically happy one—where people were lost but still managed to struggle and live. Now he had a wound to show for entering the real world. Now he was ready to step in front of the truck named Billy Cooperman.

  Billy was on the up, even if his name seemed to belong to the realm of chintzy porn. Graham had known him for years and sometimes sent students his way, because Billy seemed to have figured out the ways to sign up good local creative talent before they ended up in California to have their souls crushed by the Morlocks of Hollywood. He placed his bets early, he lost some, he won some, but overall, Graham was convinced, he was bound to be a winner, for one simple reason: he believed in himself like a motherfucker. Zombie Wars looked pretty promising, Graham thought, and it was time Joshua should meet the people and learn the skill of being in the room. Of course, he could go crazy and fly out to LA to meet the people (Who were the people, actually? Joshua had wondered. What’s a real room?), but that meant hotels and plane tickets, bling and fancy dinners, all the dazzling shit required for minimum respect, never actually provided. Or he could begin at home, before Billy hit it out of the park. The worst-case scenario: Joshua would learn a thing or two about pitching his stories.

  The whole thing, smallish as it was, had a kind of movie-business orchestration about it: Graham connected them; Joshua sent pages from Zombie Wars; Billy agreed to meet him. But as soon as a lunch meeting had been scheduled, Joshua became overwhelmed with embarrassment, as if he’d gotten drunk and naked in front of his grandparents (which had indeed happened at least once upon a time). By now it all was as if it had been arranged decades ago, in those happy times before the Bosnian wrecking crew had entered his life and Kimmy escaped, before Ana had laid a claim on him, before Bernie sent him his cancerous text message. The intents and purposes neither of his life nor of Zombie Wars were easy to recall, but he was just too fatigued not to go with the flow. And the little man clamored in the crawl space, hungry for notable experiences.

  Billy was waiting for Joshua at Sushi Samurai, at least one baby bottle of sake already consumed. He reminded Joshua of someone else, yet someone irretrievable from memory: short and taut, like a ballet dancer, with a pointy nose, small mouth, and playboy pompadour. He wore a slick navy jacket, as if he’d just parked his yacht around the corner, his white shirt unbuttoned to reveal a wedge of hoary chest. He said nothing as he spread his arms for an embrace Joshua walked right into. Billy rubbed his back and squeezed him, as if checking for wires under his clothes. In the limelight of Billy’s Botox-survivor grin, Joshua placed his ass in the chair.

  “So?” Billy asked, still standing.

  “So?”

  “So what does your gut tell you?”

  “About what?” Joshua asked.

  “About me!” Billy’s smile was unchanged, his eyebrows curled up a little in what ought to have been surprise. How does one learn to move different parts of one’s face independently? Joshua’s gut was growling with hunger and regret, telling him he should be having a cheeseburger elsewhere. He considered getting up and leaving, but then he would have to confront Graham and explain everything. You gotta grab an opportunity by the balls, Graham had said. Why would an opportunity have balls? was the unanswerable question. Why not, say, breasts? Or some other kind of opportunistic protuberance? Why not grab an opportunity by the nose? And how would an opportunity react, if it indeed had a body, to having one of its parts grabbed? The human mind does not involve adequate knowledge of the parts composing the human body.

  “You gotta go by your gut,” Billy said. “Brains is for amateurs.”

  The waiter, too large and slow to be a professional—easily cast as the laziest sibling in the family, the prodigal son who came back from college as a stoned failure—approached them gingerly, his pen at attention. Billy adjusted his smile to garble something at him.

  “Excuse me?” the waiter said.

  “It’s Japanese,” Billy said. “It means: ‘My Japanese is bad.’”

  “I’m Korean.”

  “My Japanese is still bad!” Billy laughed, the loyal soldier of the ever-growing army of people who laugh at their own jokes. They laugh because they feel no one else would or should. A symptom of injurious loneliness, the little man noted. One day there might be only solo laughter, the streets ringing with the roars of abysmal solitude. Joshua spread his napkin, tucking a corner into the shallows of his chest, if only to avoid being witness to the embarrassing exchange. The waiter looked toward the bar, as if asking for help. There was no one at the bar; no help was forthcoming.

  “Anything to drink?” he asked Joshua.

  “What kind of green tea do you have?”

  “Green. And greener,” the waiter said. He already disliked Joshua, because of his affiliation with Billy.

  “Green, then,” Joshua said. He was going to buy some expensive green tea in Chinatown and deliver it to Bernie. The waiter abandoned them for the comfort of the empty bar, where he reread the order with a confounded expression on his face. Joshua could tell his escape paths were just as foreclosed.

  Billy was an expert on sushi, ate it with his fingers, the way it was done in Japan. He’d spent a summer in Tokyo, where he’d picked up the language. Food in Tokyo was incredibly expensive. An avocado cost a hundred dollars, Billy said, unless it was cubical, which cost even more. The Japanese grew vegetables in boxes to save space. He disliked avocado because it was the only vegetable with fat in it, a lot of it. Fat was his primary enemy. Fat was the devil himself.

  Dexterously, he deposited in his mouth one piece of sushi after another, talking all along, rice grains fluttering down to his napkin. You could tell Billy knew and liked himself well; he’d sail with himself to the end of the world and back. Joshua listened without even touching his seaweed salad, thinking without thinking: there was
a refugee woman back at home (home?) waiting for him to share her pain; there was a father filling up with evil cells; everything else was, well, kelp. He sipped the green tea occasionally, impatiently. Had Billy even read the Zombie Wars pages? Joshua considered for a moment that, first, he’d never sent the pages and, second, that he’d never in fact written them and that everything had taken place solely in his head. Script Idea #168: A desperate writer runs into a producer at a bar and pitches his movie idea. The producer loves it and wants to start shooting immediately. The writer subsequently discovers he is losing his mind. His career, including the producer, turns out to be entirely imaginary. Title: Head Shots.

  Green tea had a lot of antioxidants, Billy said, and they were good against cancer. He cleaned off his plank of sushi, pulled the napkin off his chest, releasing a flock of rice, and dabbed his mouth. He was now ready to talk business. Momentary confusion compelled Joshua to take the last piece of sushi from his plate. He wondered all of a sudden what Kimmy would think of Billy and his macho projections, of his need to dominate with grins.

  “Let’s pretend we don’t know each other at all,” Billy said. “Let’s pretend we’re at a party. Everybody’s drunk out of their minds. There’s an orgy with a rotating cast in the spare bedroom. You have exactly five seconds for your pitch. Sell me Zombie Wars.”

  His mouth loaded with unagi, Joshua slowed down his chewing to think of the way either to avoid this test or, if that proved difficult, to get up and walk away. The waiter would understand. Ana would understand. Even Kimmy would understand. Joshua swallowed.

  “Zombie Wars is a story of an ordinary man trying to survive in difficult circumstances,” he ventured.

  “Not bad. Not bad at all. But let me give you some advice. Never, ever use the word ordinary when you pitch. Ever. Another thing: trying. Heroes don’t try. They either do it or they don’t. Mainly they do it. Survive: verboten! Unless it’s a Holocaust story. And circumstances has too many syllables, easy to fumble.”

  “You know what?” Joshua said, standing up, fumbling the napkin. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “Sit down,” Billy said.

  “I’m sorry. There’s been a misunderstanding. I’m not ready for this.”

  “Sit down! Right now.”

  Joshua sat down. Billy was glaring at him so intensely it seemed possible to Joshua that he might smack him. Nervously, he took a sip of his green tea.

  “I know what you’re thinking: you think I don’t know shit. Fine! I don’t know shit,” Billy said. “But let me tell you something: I’m so sick of people like you, Joshua, who think they know what life is and they have no experience of it. None. Zero. Nada. They think they can bullshit me, like I know nothing. What did you expect when you came here? What do you think I do? What do I do? Do you know? Tell me: what do I do?”

  Billy maintained his Botox grin waiting for a response, and it was its unchanging aspect that compelled Joshua to say something.

  “You’re an agent. You represent clients.”

  “Wrong! That is wrong! Try again.”

  “I really can’t do this.”

  “I make my people look good so I can sell their goods. I can sell a phone book page as a treatment for The Return of Titanic. I get things done. That’s what I do. I am an agent because I have agency. I know you don’t have an agent, but do you have agency, Joshua?”

  As Joshua comprehended the question, Billy signaled to the waiter with a little twirl of his index finger as if demanding a pirouette. Instead, the waiter moved at deliberately slow speed between the vacant tables, pushing the chairs aside.

  “No, you don’t,” Billy said. “Which is why you need an agent.”

  The waiter arrived, visibly exhausted by his slow-motion slalom. Billy ordered a selection of mochi balls without consulting Joshua, shaking his head as if astonished at the perfection of his choices. This man’s energy was so abundant as to be desperate and therefore pathetic.

  “You gotta figure out what to do with all that potential you have, because potential can fuck you up big time,” Billy said as the waiter retreated. “Yes, zombies could be killed all day long and no sane person would ever root for them. Yes, God made them for boys and video games. Yes, there are loads of redemption, and killer units, and heads exploding, and cultural references up your backside. Yes, the main guy is a doctor. Yes, there should be a lady. And yes, I can get someone real nice for the female lead, Gwyneth or someone like that.”

  “Gwyneth? Gwyneth Paltrow? You know Gwyneth Paltrow?”

  “Are you kidding me? Of course I don’t. Fuck Gwyneth Paltrow, she’s done for. I was thinking of Gwyneth Szpika. A star in the making. Brilliant in Improv Hamlet,” Billy said. “This is Chicago. We win big only if we place our bets early.”

  The waiter spilled water all over the table while topping up Billy’s glass and then dropped a bundle of dirty chopsticks, which danced on the floor. Billy and Joshua were the only patrons in the restaurant, perhaps the last ones before it closed its doors for good and released its indentured staff to pursue greener tea pastures. The waiter kicked the chopsticks out of sight, under some other table, into some undetermined future.

  “I’ll be honest with you, Joshie: I need you like I need a broken broom handle up my ass. I got so many clients I’m gonna have to start offing them. Why? Because nobody believes in my people more than I do. Every artist has to believe in himself. Yes, of course! It’s a cliché. But what happens when it feels like all your belief is drained away? When there’s nothing left in the tank? This is where I come in: I believe in you! I’m like a Swiss bank of belief. I keep it forever.”

  He was mopping the water around his glass with a napkin.

  “See that waiter? He’ll never make it in the world of waiting. Why? Because nobody believes in him. Do you think his boss believes in him? Do you believe in him? I don’t.”

  Joshua looked at the waiter. He was there, so he was believable. To Joshua it seemed that the waiter’s biggest problem was plain, mind-crushing low-wage boredom: the pain in the calves, the same demanding assholes, the same Muzak loop, the same orders, over and over again. Meanwhile, elsewhere, everywhere, the world unfurled like a flag. The basic task in everyone’s life was pretending it was more than mere survival.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Josh: Why would George believe in me—in me, in this fledgling novice? Why would George want to waste his resources on a client with another zombie idea when all the film crews in the world could spend the next bazillion years shooting only the optioned zombie scripts? Well, Josh, I’ll be honest with you.”

  Billy deferred being honest for a long moment, his gaze fixated on Joshua, who asked the obvious question: “Who’s George?”

  “I’m George,” Billy said.

  “I thought you were Billy.”

  “George for clients, Billy for friends.”

  “Why?”

  “This business, Josh, is a bitch. Let me worry about all that. There is no I in team.”

  “But there is am,” Joshua observed.

  “What’s that?”

  “There is am. As in I am. T-E-am. The subject is implied in the verb.”

  If it hadn’t been for the Muzak molasses dripping from the speakers at the bar, they would’ve been sunk in uncomfortable silence.

  “Joshie, I like you,” Billy/George said, his face clouding, “but you don’t even know that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It was clear there was no hope available here. The pitching practice was now over, it was time to return to the dugout. And for the first time, Joshua thought of himself as a man who knew something others didn’t: he knew Ana; he knew his father’s cancer; he knew the little man in the crawl space. What he knew about all that exactly he didn’t know, but he felt the weight of knowledge in his head and muscles; the door opened, and he was stepping in.

  “I tell you what: this is obviously not gonna work out,” Billy/George said. “But I like you, a
nd Graham is a buddy of mine, so I’ll give you some free advice. First, get yourself in the writers’ room, work your way up from there. They’re shooting shitloads of TV in Chicago now, because we’re far more real than LA. Send around some samples, after you clean them up first. There’s lot of passive in there, a lot of college-level wrylies. And a lot of expensive set pieces. You amateurs shoot the movie in your head. An extra shot of espresso and galaxies collide. But get your first job, then get another one, and then a worse one, and before you know it, you’ll be writing for Michael Bay.”

  “Who’s Michael Bay?”

  “Who’s Michael Bay!? Did you really just ask me that?”

  Billy/George put his hand on his chest to affect surprise. He had an amethyst pinky ring. Joshua should’ve felt disappointment, but he felt instead like having won a contest: Billy/George was more desperate/deluded than him; Joshua’s experience now equipped him to see it clearly. The waiter put the check in front of Billy/George, who pushed it over to Joshua without looking at it.

  “He just asked me who Michael Bay was,” he said to the waiter, or to himself, or to anyone willing to be appalled at the ignorance.

  “Who’s Michael Bay?” the waiter asked.

  “Who’s Michael Bay!?” Billy/George clutched his head in exhibitionist disbelief. “Let’s just say he owns an island.”

  I know what I know, Joshua thought. I can do it, whatever it is. He had the weight; he was acquainted with the real people; he had things to say and impart. He was a screenwriter, even if he had nothing to show for it. Fuck Billy and George and the whole lot of them! And more than anyone else, fuck Bega!

  There was no way he wasn’t going to the workshop tonight.

  * * *

  Hence he took up an afternoon residency at the Coffee Shoppe and, fueled by a sequence of galactic-collision-grade cappuccinos, cranked out an entirely new scene, and then another one, and, then, another one. For the first time in a long while, he could perceive the far beacon of a finished script, the end of Zombie Wars, beyond which the lights of his better self shyly flickered.