The Making of Zombie Wars Read online

  “I don’t want nothing from you. I just like to watch how you don’t know shit.”

  “Shit about what?”

  “About people. About world. About everything.”

  “And how do you know all that shit?”

  “I watch. I pay attention. I know.”

  “Should I be scared of you? Is that what you’re saying? ’Coz I’m not.”

  “You should be scared of yourself.”

  “I’m not scared of anything. I don’t give a fuck,” Joshua said, and called for another bourbon. Kontam fucking neyshn. Bega raised his hand with two fingers to indicate he’d have one too.

  “I’m not buying you a drink,” Joshua said.

  “It’s okay,” Bega said. “I’m buying you.”

  Paco delivered the bourbons and returned to his spot, picking up Bega’s Sun-Times along the way, immediately flipping to the sports pages.

  “So,” Bega said. “A Bosnian, we call him Mujo, hates his wife’s cat, wants to get rid of it. He puts cat in the bag. He drives to country, to forest outside his town, lets cat out of the bag, drives back home, cat is sitting on the stairs waiting for him. Tomorrow, his wife goes to work, Mujo does it again: cat in the bag, to country, deeper into forest, lets cat out, back home. Cat is sitting on the stairs waiting for him.”

  Why would he bring up the cat again? Joshua would fight him, if he had to. He’d headbutt him, and kick at his knees, and then stomp on his fucking face. Paco looked up from the papers to listen to Bega. He never paid any attention to his patrons, but here he was, enamored with Bega.

  “Tomorrow, again: cat in the bag, to country, even deeper in forest, cat out. But then Mujo gets lost in forest, can’t find way out. So he calls his wife at home. ‘How ya doin’?’ ‘Fine,’ she says. ‘Is cat at home?’ Mujo asks. ‘Yes,’ she says. He says: ‘Can you put him on the phone?’”

  Bega slapped the bar with his open hand, exhorting Joshua and Paco to laugh. Joshua suppressed a feeble chuckle to maintain his mask of anger, but Paco chortled exactly once, which, in the gloomy world of the Westmoreland, was the equivalent of roaring laughter. The chortle turned out to be worth two shots on the house.

  “I slept with Ana once too,” Bega said suddenly. “It was okay.”

  The confession coincided with the return of the burning sensation from Joshua’s stomach to his throat.

  “Back in Sarajevo. She was widow before Esko. We were tired.” Bega sipped his bourbon, smacking his lips. “We take it as it comes. We swim in catastrophe.”

  “What is wrong with you people?” Joshua wheezed, his throat still burning but now accompanied by the pain in his lungs. Shed your wrath upon the assholes that do not recognize you, and on the kingdoms that will not proclaim your name! His eyes were now tearing up. He didn’t want Bega to think that he was going to cry. The way it should work: every day of your life you wake up knowing a little more. The way it ends up working: the less you know, the less you care, the less you’re scared, the better it is.

  “You people? You think you are special?” Bega said. “You think you are her hero?”

  “I don’t think anything,” Joshua said. “I just can’t get back to where I was before.”

  “Nobody ever can,” Bega said. “Welcome to world.”

  “Does Esko know that you slept with Ana?” Joshua asked.

  “What happens in the war, stays in the war,” Bega said. “You can never get to where you was before. The war destroys all before.”

  Joshua called for another round. There was a part of him—mainly abdominal—that wanted to elbow Bega’s nose and break it, that would enjoy a river of blood advancing along the filthy bar, coloring the beer puddles, soaking the coasters. But there was another part of him for whom merely lifting the elbow off the bar demanded effort and conviction he no longer possessed. Where did his konviksheyn go?

  “What are you going to do with Ana?” Bega asked.

  “What am I going to do? Nothing. What can I do? It’s up to her,” Joshua said. “She’s the battered woman.”

  “Battered woman? Esko never touched her.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m their friend. I live close. I know.”

  You people, he wanted to say again, but it hit him, with all the force of the bourbon, that he was turning into one of the you people too. Everyone at the Westmoreland was a foreigner, Bega the foremost of them; everyone everywhere was foreign and strange, the world equally populated with you peoples, here or in Bosnia or in fukn Iraq. He was leaving America, Joshua was, the bar stool and Jim Beam the only things tenuously providing koynekshen. And once he left, he was going to stay out, never to return. Like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers, leaving again, forever heroically outside, holding his elbow, until the door closes in his face.

  * * *

  I’m not going to be afraid. I’m going to be ready, thought Joshua. But ready for what? The night outside was disorderly, with the kind of wind that made him grind his teeth and pinch the skin on his forearms. I can’t even remember what okay looks like. What would okay actually look like? The only okay Joshua could presently recall was watching Dawn of the Dead with Kimmy in his arms. That particular okay was no longer okay and never would be. Ana biting his cheek while coming was almost okay too. He touched his wound as if to confirm that he hadn’t been imagining his life up to this point. Magnolia was deserted, not even random car alarms cared to provide evidence of human presence. No nightingales either. Bega had told him tonight he liked his zombies. He’d been well drunk, but he liked the zombies, and Joshua believed him because Bega had been too drunk to lie and Joshua had been too drunk not to believe him.

  He stood under his apartment window, watching Ana’s shadow moving in and out of the weakly lit frame. He’d never looked from the outside at anyone inside his apartment—when he was not there, nobody was there. How was it that time passed even when you were not there, or when you were asleep? Before all this (what exactly was all this?), there had never been anybody in his space to bear witness to the alleged object permanence: it had to have been possible that all the objects inside his place disintegrated when he was not there to look at them, reintegrating into their ineluctable visibility only upon his return, which was why they always seemed so static. And what would happen if one day he didn’t return? Nothingness would permanently replace the stasis and reign in the space that once hosted his being. Tonight, Ana’s pacing shadow was surely what kept it all together.

  The thing with zombies was, Bega had said, the more undead, the fewer living. Moreover, every living person was always a potential zombie. “Bosnians say: we fucked the hedgehog,” Bega had said, laughing and slapping the bar like he was insane, beer bottles hopping all over it. Why was that funny? What did it even mean? None of the things he said made much sense.

  The warm wind made the branches on the street titter. The buildings, the cars, the city appeared tensely still, as if wound up and ready to spring into a frenzy. Could nightingales survive in Chicago? Are they migrating birds or do they shiver in tree holes all winter long? Darkness was centered around a burning dot on the porch.

  “Good evening, sweet prince,” Stagger greeted him.

  “I’m not in the mood, Stagger,” Joshua growled, coming up the stairs. “It hasn’t been a good day.”

  Stagger exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke, infusing the night with the skunky smell of weed. “What’s wrong? Tell your landlord,” he said.

  “Many things are wrong. In fact, almost everything is,” Joshua said.

  “I happen to got a homemade stress inhibitor right here. This shit can smooth the wrinkles out of your grandmother’s ass,” Stagger said, offering him a fat joint. Joshua had already put his hand on the door handle to proceed upstairs, but the little weed light burned before him like a beacon. He took the fattie off the tips of Stagger’s fingers and inhaled a veritable storm cloud. The alcohol burn in his chest reactivated, and he started coughing so violently he had to sit d
own. His landlord rubbed his back, a bit too supportively. Joshua gave him back the weed.

  “I dreamed last night I was a Mexican hockey player,” Stagger said, sucking in smoke. “I wore the skates and all the padding, but also a sombrero. Man! Why a sombrero? I was beating this dude with my hockey stick, cutting his face open, breaking his teeth. But I had a sombrero. Fuck me!”

  Stagger passed back the joint.

  “Sombrero’s weird,” Joshua said, and inhaled without expectoration.

  They passed the diminishing joint back and forth for a while, even though a ball of coughing pain was still lodged deep in Joshua’s lungs. This child of Israel groans from the toil and cries to God from under the weight of his work. “Joint chiefs of good shit, we are,” Stagger announced.

  Gradually, the lumps of anxiety in Joshua’s mind and body shrank and then began dissipating. He enjoyed the unwinding; he sagged into the wicker chair. The night was strangely warm. Why hadn’t he thought of drugs before? Alcohol had certainly helped some, but he should’ve been smoking or snorting something every day. Drugs were such a pleasantly simple solution and widely available too. There was a good reason why millions of good, decent Americans took drugs every day, legally and illegally, pursuing their happiness stresslessly and successfully. An idea unrolled itself before him like a beach towel: he could get some real shit, or even some real good shit, and share it with Bernie. It would help with every problem, medical and mental. Bernie was drugged up anyway, but with boring shit. Now was the time for Joshua to explore some truly mind-altering shit while bonding at zeppelin-high altitudes with Bernie Levin. And while they were at it: there must be other things too that they could do together, Joshua and his father. Although he couldn’t think of any other things right now. Abruptly, scorchingly, it was clear how little time they had left to do anything.

  “Fucking sombrero,” Stagger said.

  Time maybe passes when you’re not there, but not when you’re really not there, because if you’re really not there, you’re dead. Time flows, all right, but it can at any moment just stop. Hence Joshua giggled to himself: life appeared to him exactly like the joint burning inexorably toward his fingertips—once it’s smoked it cannot be unsmoked. Stagger extended his arm to place the fattie before Joshua’s mouth, so that he only needed to lean forward and suck the smoke, and that was precisely what he did.

  “They got no idea what they’re dealing with in that fucking desert,” Stagger said. “They think we’ll fuck them real hard and sooner or later they’ll learn to like it. Who wouldn’t wanna be fucked by the world’s only remaining superdick?”

  Joshua had difficulties processing Stagger’s claims, so he continued to giggle until tears trickled down his cheeks. He wiped his wet face against his shoulders and inhaled another generous helping of the THC. The Messiah, whenever he decides to stop by, will surely be a supreme drug dealer; the promise of salvation is nothing if not the promise of being eternally high, never coming down. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations. But everyone whose name is found written in the book will get a little sack of crack and float like a swallow in the friendly sky. There will be great respect for the care and the precision, so it should all be okay. Giggling made Joshua’s cheek hurt.

  “If there’s pain in every man’s heart you gotta shoot them in the head. Bang!” Stagger transformed his hand into a gun, using three fingers for the barrel.

  Pain in the heart was right, Joshua thought. In fact, he may even have said it, but there was no way of really knowing, as Stagger failed to react or acknowledge. Every person is the first person, but who will be the last person? Not everyone can be the last person. There’ll be a lot of fighting over who gets to be the last person. He felt he was sweating.

  “The only thing you can ever rely on are your buddies,” Stagger went on. “The jerk-off on the bed above you, from Kansas of all places, like what’s-her-name.”

  Who will be the lucky guy to see everything off? To the last person everything is past. There is no future at the end of the world. How do zombies handle time? He should look it up in the Zombie Encyclopedia, under “Time.” If the undead could come back, how would they remember anything that happened in their undead pasts? Would they remember chomping on people’s intestines? Perhaps that’s why they look so spent and exhausted: they can fly to no fucking sky. It wasn’t improbable that Stagger had rolled another thick serving of THC and the Lord knew what else, for it appeared considerably fatter when the joint came back to Joshua. It may have been fattened with hashish, because the smell was now different. Although Joshua had never smoked hashish, so he couldn’t really know. There was so much more to find out about this life, a fearsome prospect if it wasn’t for the fact that life was always almost over. On top of it, he was now hungry like a zombie. And sweating like a human.

  “We drank water out of our boots. Man!” Stagger shouted. “Out of our blasted boots! We rolled weed in lettuce. We died standing. We fucked standing. We shat standing.”

  “What?” Joshua was finally compelled to ask. It wasn’t that he wanted to understand—understanding, he understood, wasn’t going to happen right now, or anytime soon; in fact, it seemed to be permanently out of his reach. “What are you talking about?” It was that he couldn’t afford to be further discombobulated, because discombobulation made him dizzy. Dizzy and voraciously hungry, and giggly, and discombobulated.

  “Fucking sombrero,” Stagger said.

  There were far too many things bombing him presently with care and precision. He needed Stagger to slow down, he was not cool. Stagger was now thrusting the three-finger-barrel gun at Joshua’s feet, as if shooting them off.

  “Freedom itself was attacked, Jonjo,” Stagger said quietly and slowly, so Joshua could comprehend. “We’re talking about things that matter.”

  “What things are we talking about?” Joshua asked, dropping the obese hashish motherfucker on the porch floor. What did matter a lot was the fattie, so he went down on his knees to look under his chair, but only darkness was there and then the light came, everything down there was flashing and moving. He saw a mouse scurrying along the wall, but it was a blue plastic bag with the phone book and coupons. There was a coin, a quarter possibly, shiny. Kimmy, Ana, and Joshua, a happy threesome in a perfect world, the three sides of the same coin. The healthy, happy Body family, living right across the street from the miserable, terminally ill Thought family. How good would that be? Stagger was barefoot and his toes were misaligned, his feet not symmetrical at all, the whole pedal anatomy completely fucked. He wore Joshua’s American flag underwear; the stars on it shone too. Was it summer already? Where was the fattie? And while we’re at it, where’s everything? The moment you lose sight of it, it vanishes. Where are people when they’re not here? Where does time go when it passes? What is the home of death? What is a nightingale? Where is Bernie, where is he going? He needed to find the fat motherfucker.

  “Do you even know how huge that Iraq place is? And it keeps growing, like a tapeworm. I’m not kidding.” Stagger was back to speaking at the top of his voice, clapping his hands, as if to reduce the mysterious huge place into a patty-cake. “He was the first man I ever cared about. That’s God’s honest truth.”

  “Fuck” was all Joshua could say. He still could not find the joint and he decided that giving up and getting up wouldn’t be honorable. The Pottery Barn rule: you fuck it up, you’re a fucking idiot. Don’t fuck it up.

  “What’s down there?” Stagger asked and, moving his head like a turtle, joined Joshua on his knees to look under the chair, only to roll onto his back with a grunt.

  “I can’t find the dope,” Joshua said. “I lost the fattie. It just disappeared.”

  “Oh, man!” cried Stagger. “Do you want some of mine?”

  Only then did Joshua see that Stagger had in his hand a joint, which in its rewarding overweightness definitely looked familiar. Joshua rolled onto his back as well, took the bles
sed joint, and inhaled as if his life depended on it, which it did. They were blowing smoke at the undersides of their respective chairs. If someone had been sitting in those chairs, they’d be blowing smoke up their asses. Being alive is nothing if not a bunch of discombobulating possibilities. And sweating.

  “What is this?” Joshua asked, exhaling. “This cannot be just pot.”

  “There’s a touch of pot. Some homemade stuff too. Plus some of those head pills, cooked down to very potent chemicals,” Stagger said. “Old Desert Storm recipe. It’s what got us all through.”

  The front door opened and they could see a woman’s feet: narrow, graceful toes painted in heavenly colors. Mindlessly, Joshua sat up straight and therefore banged his forehead against the chair. There had been a time when the independence of his teenage room was not respected by his mother, who would barge in as his arm was in his crotch. And now he was hungry and his forehead hurt.

  “Joshua?” Ana said, softly.

  Stagger must not have noticed her, for he kept rambling:

  “The sand, man. The fucking sand. Everything you put in your mouth was crunchy. I hate crunchy. I’d rather eat ass than crunchy cereal.”

  “Alma is not here,” Ana said. “Alma is somewhere and I don’t know where. I am worry.”

  Joshua kept stretching his jaw, as if it were out of joint and if he put it back in place everything else would follow, beginning with processing the basic inflow of sensory information. The recollection machinery would soon be working; he could hear the screeching in his head. He couldn’t remember where he’d got the pair of underwear Stagger was wearing. Present from Mom? Or an ironic college-era acquisition? Also, Ana’s last name. Karenina? I must be dreaming, Bond-James-Bond said.

  “Fucking sombrero,” Stagger said.

  “Give her some time,” Joshua said, inhaling adagio and exhaling staccato. “She’s probably coming down somewhere. When she comes down, she’ll come home.”

  “It is two in the morning,” Ana said. Her level-five English as a Second Language protected her from Joshua’s sinister insinuations. Suddenly he remembered the lost fattie and returned to looking for it. It didn’t bother him that he was at the same time hiding from Ana and her demands. He didn’t want her to know he was high out of his mind. He was going to find the fattie and compose himself under the chair and then reemerge to face Ana in the shape of the man she’d become miraculously attracted to, a steeled dandruff survivor. Except was her last name! Ana Except loves him so much that they’ll go together and make a proposition to Kimmy. I am surrounded by all nations and loaded with evil cells, in the name of the Lord, I will crush them like dried leaves.