The Making of Zombie Wars Read online

  He decided to stop by a bar for a nightcap and then some. Fuck this, he thought, by the end of this night I’ll have been laid. I can kiss you for that. He’d never in his life been picked up by a woman in a bar—or any other place—but tonight he felt that he could finally have the shameless gumption to let it happen. I don’t know what to do, she’d said. Here I am, Joshua thought, prepared and ardent, allied and present. The Westmoreland was around the corner, but there was no chance that he could find there any women worthy of copulation, and even if he could, they were likely to be more desperate than him. Maybe many years ago, Ana said. He envisioned the young Ana kissing Zosya, Zosya undressing her; nipples; moaning; the whole shebang. He who recollects a thing by which he was once pleased desires to possess it in the same circumstances as when he first was pleased by it. He who was never pleased is doomed to an eternal hard-on.

  He biked down Clark, stopping to peek through the windows of various bars, looking for women. Only gay bars were full; the heterosexual joints were empty—the heteros massively committed to watching television with their falsely monogamous spouses. He recalled that a cute, potentially promiscuous bartender worked at Charlie’s Ale House, but when he looked in, there was nobody, not even a bartender. In case of a zombie apocalypse, would people fuck more, or less, or at all? What if the zombie hunger were not visceral but carnal? He should look more into zombie porn. If they’d already come up with a flick called Weapons of Ass Destruction, there had to be a Night of the Fucking Dead.

  To the Westmoreland it was, then. Down Clark Street people moved in units of desire and negotiable friendship, under the neon lights promising pleasure and warmth against the Chicago chill. He left Clark to enter the side-street darkness at the end of which he found the Westmoreland, ever tucked inside a strip mall between a tire shop and a Curves front office. The bar was, naturally, vacant—time seemed to have stopped here, as Paco was in the same position, with the same goiter, watching the same TV, except this time it showed baseball highlights.

  “Hey, Paco!” Joshua said. He would’ve loved it if Paco could remember him, but he didn’t and it was likely that he never would. He nodded instead, bartenderly.

  “Do you have any good Pinot Noir?” Joshua asked.

  “No,” Paco said, not a muscle on his face moving. “But the Jell-O shots are fantastic.”

  Joshua waited for some indication of Paco’s seriousness level, but he was unbending: no indication was provided.

  “I’d prefer some red wine,” Joshua said.

  There was a time when he could conceive of a life that would permit him to wake up happy in the morning. Such a life was now beyond the reach of his imagination, nor could he remember what it would’ve exactly looked like. Still, it was fair to say that the minimum requirement for a truly enjoyable existence would be unbridled promiscuity. There is that great moment in Goldfinger when the leader of the fantastically blond crew of female flyers tells James Bond: “I’m Pussy Galore,” and he says: “I must be dreaming!”

  Right now, it didn’t look good, the life. What doesn’t kill you makes you horny. Paco delivered the wine and said, “Three dollars,” at which point Joshua patted his pockets to find out that his wallet was absent.

  “I can’t find my wallet,” he told Paco, expecting understanding or forgiveness. But Paco kept staring at him, the goiter throbbing with judgment. Whereupon he took the wine bottle, unscrewed the top, and poured the wine back into the bottle. He then returned to the same position to watch the TV.

  * * *

  Joshua retraced his bike ride back to Ana’s place, stopping by the same still-empty bars, scanning the pavement in the hope of spotting the wallet, the coil of his lust unshuffling along the way. There was nothing to be found other than cigarette butts and shreds of coupon sheets and broken bottles and a few used condoms. He stopped at the light and, more out of need to distract himself from worry than out of a sense of responsibility, he checked his phone and discovered he had eight calls and five messages from Kimiko, and there was one from his father. He listened to Kimmy’s first message: she just wanted him to call back and let her know when he’d be coming home. Now it was nearly midnight and she must be sleeping. He called and hung up after one ring. If someone imagines that someone loves him, and does not believe he has given any cause for it, he should love in return.

  Leaning on his bike in front of the Ambassador, he looked up in search of Ana’s window. Only one was lit up, and he decided, based on nothing at all, that it belonged to her. He looked at buzzers, searching for her last name, which he could not pronounce, even if she’d pronounced it for him in class nearly every time. There were names that looked Bosnian in that the consonants were randomly distributed, but he could not be sure. He called the number in his cell. It rang, then the answering service picked up. Her voice was clear and bright and lovely. He left a message to a vision of her in a nightgown, barefoot, warm.

  He loitered outside until someone walked out of the building with an ancient, sick beagle and gave him a glance of suspicion. Rather than slipping in through the glacially closing door, he decided to walk around the neighborhood and wait for Ana’s call.

  The rows of houses were dark; here and there a light was on. A dog barked in some backyard. The swings stood still on porches. Who lived here? He could spend his entire life in Chicago—in this very neighborhood—without ever learning anything about the people who lived at 4509 West Estes. The unknown lives, the dark matter of the city. Message comes, I arrived to the other world. Except, in front of a dark house, he saw a red car with a pair of plush dice hanging from the rearview mirror. It was Bega’s car.

  His phone rang. It wasn’t Kimmy.

  “Hello, Ana,” he said with the gentlest of his seductive voices.

  “Teacher Josh,” she whispered, “you find your wallet?”

  “No,” Joshua said.

  “This is not good time,” Ana said. Esko yelled in the background. “I look for it and I call you. Or I see you on Monday. Goodnight.”

  And then she hung up. What if Monday never came? Joshua thought. Script Idea #72: The last day on Earth as it approaches a voracious black hole. Title: The Last Fucking Time.

  INT. THE AMBASSADOR — NIGHT

  A group of men under the leadership of Major Klopstock moves through darkness, carving it with their flashlights. CADET (20) and GOITER (59) with a shotgun follow in Major K’s wake. They enter an open, vast space with high ceilings. They hear ECHOES OF WATER SPLASHING, and then the flashlights reveal a pool full of floating zombies in army uniforms. Most of them are bloated and fully dead. Some are broken open, like pomegranates. A few of them are on their backs, moving feebly, but it’s clear they’re done for. The men stand in silence at the pool’s edge. The water is murky with pus and blood.

  GOITER

  (scratching his goiter)

  I wouldn’t wanna swim in that fucking pool.

  CADET

  This used to be our guys. Now they’re mindless killers.

  MAJOR K

  They’re harmless in the water. They don’t sink, but they soak up water until they burst like balloons.

  A floating zombie slightly moves its hand, as if trying to swim. Goiter shoots it in the face. The head explodes into smithereens. The shot ECHOES. Cadet joins in, as do other men. They shoot like crazy. The waves make other corpses bob in the pool. Major K tries to interrupt the shooting.

  MAJOR K

  Cut it out! Cut it out!

  But the men enjoy the free-for-all too much to stop. Finally, Major K rips the gun out of Cadet’s hand and smacks him. Everyone stops shooting. Major K stares them down angrily. The silence is even more oppressive. Except now they can hear ECHOES of a cell phone RINGING somewhere in the building. The ring tone is “Welcome to the Jungle.” They exchange glances, grip their weapons, and move in the direction of the sound.

  Joshua needed his wallet and thus had a legitimate excuse to call Ana. He was shivering on the porch steps—it was
a cold day, clouds on the western horizon getting lined up for a rain assault—because he was reluctant to call her from Kimmy’s house, as though his illicit desires were less so outdoors. He was going to claim urgency; he wasn’t going to tell her he’d canceled his credit cards because, well, he wasn’t exactly sure who those people at her place had been, nor could he trust Esko. Ana’s answering machine picked up but he left no message. He put the phone back in his pocket, but then took it out immediately because it appeared to be vibrating, which it wasn’t.

  Cackling squirrels chased one another up and down the trees. There was a pretty spotted pointer across the street, for some reason pointing at Joshua; the young man on the other end of the leash bent over to pick up a clump of shit. Joshua felt in his chest the emptiness commonly accompanying the sense that he was wasting his life and that all this—this porch, this body, this mind, this Monday—was part of a self-generating delusion, his own private Matrix. What if he woke up one day, after a night of unsettling dreams, and realized he was transformed into a giant, chitinous failure? If one day someone were to write his biography (The Fall of Joshua Levin), this morning might end up being the turning plot point, the moment of his demotion to the middlest of ages, of his realization that the spoor of his meaningful existence was as scant as that of memorable sexual experience. He called Ana again, and this time Esko picked up, his guttural grumble befuddling Joshua, who hung up instantly.

  Bernie honked from his ferry-sized white Cadillac. In addition to the glaring absence of sun, Bernie’s shades were not age-appropriate at all: the frames were too narrow for his sagging face; there was fake-diamond glitter on the sides; and the lenses were far too dark even for a bright summer day, suggesting glaucoma rather than senior coolness. The shades were most likely Constance’s present, just like the flannel shirt he was wearing with his sleeves rolled up, like a campaigning congressman feigning to be the American people. Constance bought things for Bernie Levin that made him appear younger (a razor-looking cell phone, many-geared bicycle, surfboard), thereby constantly setting up Bern (as she called him) for some kind of age-based failure. The next thing on her list was a spiffy car. She wanted him to get something smaller and sportier than his enormous Cadillac, which Joshua was presently entering and which would’ve smelled like a pine-scented taxicab if it wasn’t for the reek of Bernie’s rampant paradentosis.

  “Where are we going?” Joshua asked testily. Once he’d watched a nature documentary in which young chimps would strut around the uninterested older males making contemptuous chimp faces; and then, one day, they would dare for the first time to smack the elders.

  “I don’t know,” his father said. “Aren’t we having lunch?”

  “It’s too early,” Joshua said.

  “It’s never too early for being too late.”

  Joshua was no strutting chimp, but Bernie annoyed him simply for doing what aged fathers did: asking Where are you? as soon as Joshua picked up, still confounded by the concept of the cell phone; always worrying about money, ever a Holocaust descendant; celebrating his Jewish heritage by imparting incomprehensible stories about obscure relatives; driving like a terrified lunatic, flying over speed bumps, hitting the brakes arbitrarily; insisting that he wasn’t as old as he was, even if he was nowhere near as young as Connie wanted him to be. And then there were the anthological non sequiturs, whose frequency kept increasing since he’d retired and sold his dental office. The previous time Joshua had seen him, just before he took off for the cruise, Bernie proclaimed—over dinner, out of the blue, Connie squeezing his hand as if to show her forgiveness and understanding for his dementia—“the future of the world is in a bag of dog poop, because that’s where the bacteria that can eat plastic will evolve.” After he’d retired into a life of magazine subscriptions and cruises, he had more than enough time to think inconsequentially. It’s never too early for being too late? What the hell did that mean?

  “I’ve got to go to my screenwriting workshop later,” Joshua said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Bernie said. “Let’s go to the lake.”

  Whereupon he made a U-turn right in the middle of Broadway, cars honking furiously in their wake.

  “How’s your movie stuff going?” Bernie asked. He didn’t really want to know, as he didn’t really care. Your movie stuff meant that, as far as he was concerned, it was all just plain indulgent.

  “Swimmingly.”

  “What are you working on now?”

  All that screenwriting and film business was, as Bernie had once eloquently put it, “smoke up the ass.” It certainly didn’t help that Joshua never sold anything, never earned a dime with his writing; nor did it help that, for Bernie, Saul Bellow was the be all and end all of narrative art, truer than the truth itself, pretty close to displacing Moses as the greatest Jew of all time. Not least because Bernie had met him more than once at various dinner parties.

  “It’s called Zombie Wars,” Joshua said, spitefully.

  Bernie made another turn and now they were driving down the parking lot along the lake; the expanse of the Wilson Street beach opened up in the distance like a prairie. He kept tapping on the brake as if it were a bass-drum pedal, so that they kept lurching forward. There was nobody around, except for an occasional man sitting alone in a car. Joshua knew it was a daytime pick-up spot for cruising men, but he didn’t mention it to Bernie, sure he’d have no idea. Bernie parked two spots down from a man who tried to make eye contact to determine if he was going to get lucky with a threesome. The man looked exactly like Dick Cheney: pale and bald, egg-shaped head, rimless glasses, the detached gaze of a sociopath.

  “What’s it about?” Bernie asked. Another annoying thing: relentless questions. He never let Joshua be silent, quick to counter his reticence with an onslaught of inquiries. It was love, but maddening still. It was also fear of being left out of his children’s lives: it had started after the divorce, after the routine of biweekly visits with him had been established. The waves crested far out on the lake and kept coming; the Wilson Street beach was desolate, except for a silhouette throwing something to a very speedy dog, maybe a greyhound.

  “It’s about zombies. And wars,” Joshua said.

  “Let me ask you a question: how do they turn into zombies? Medically speaking. That’s never been clear to me.”

  “In my script they’re infected with a virus.”

  “What virus?”

  “It’s a virus, it doesn’t have a name. It’s a zombie virus.”

  “Okay. But if you know it’s a virus, shouldn’t you have a name for it? You know, something like H1Z3 or something.”

  “It’s called zombie virus.”

  “Zombie virus. I get it.”

  The water was brown-gray; the mud at its bottom had been disturbed. For Chicago, the lake was merely decoration: nobody lived on it or off it; if it somehow were drained, the city would just pave it for parking all the way to Michigan. Script Idea #79: A brutal storm releases a sunken sailboat from the bottom of the lake, and the body of a young man is found. Nobody in the small town knows who it is, as no one has been missing. Who was he? What happened to him?

  The moment of quiet was evanescent, as Bernie was whipping up more questions in his head. Like all senescent Republicans, Levin the elder believed in leadership, which started with identifying the essence of the problem.

  “But where does it come from, that virus? From a cat scratch? Or are there monkey zombies? Or bird zombies? Did the virus jump species?”

  A car pulled up next to Cheney’s. The man in it was young, wearing a suit, blond as Hitlerjugend. He and Cheney rolled down their windows, conducted their negotiations, and were gone in a blink. A little bit of lunchtime dicksucking never hurt nobody. Joshua envied the ease with which homosexuals arrived at their common interest in sex. The sad fact of life was that there were no cruising spots for heterosexual men. If there were, Joshua would be parked somewhere every day of his life, willing to sleep with any woman generous enough
to pull up alongside him.

  “Maybe it’s not a virus, but some kind of cancer,” Bernie said. “I’m just thinking aloud.”

  “Let’s not think,” Joshua hissed. “Let’s go to Charlie’s Ale House. I’m hungry.”

  Charlie’s Ale House was a long way away, with a lot of stop signs for Bernie to force the Cadillac into a great leap forward. The way he leaned into the steering wheel, the way he looked over it, as if over the fence—it just drove Joshua crazy. People honked at them from behind at every traffic light. And then, for reasons unknown, Bernie took the residential streets, quaint and porchy and lousy with speed bumps, riding them like waves. Joshua was getting nauseated.

  “Your grandfather had a cousin back in Bukovina,” Bernie said.

  Goddamn, Joshua thought.

  “Chaim was his name, I believe, and one day he stopped believing in God. The family saw that something was wrong, they took him to the rabbi. The rabbi took one look at Chaim and said: ‘My child, you will not die until you regain your faith.’ So he kept not believing. Once he was drowning and people jumped in to help him and he yelled: ‘I’m fine! I’m fine! I don’t believe in God.’ And he swam to the shore.”

  It took him a few times to park right in front of Charlie’s, never interrupting his narration, bumping into the car behind.

  “Then the Germans rounded up everyone in the village, crammed them in a house to burn them all alive. But he ran out of the burning house, screaming: ‘I don’t believe in God! I don’t believe in God!’ He lived, everyone else died.”

  Joshua was unbuckled, ready to get out, but there was no getting out until the story was over. He watched Bernie’s eyebrows—two pointy tufts of hair—as they oscillated in harmony with his narrative excitement.