The Making of Zombie Wars (10 page)

“Hard to translate,” the skinny man said.

They sat in silence for a while. When Bega restarted the conversation in Bosnian, it was serene, as if the mistranslated joke had reminded them how sad and displaced they really were. History: the first time a joke, the second time a badly translated joke. Joshua was now the only one in the room not speaking the language, but he could not leave, as if that would violate the sacred impenetrability of Bega's words. A woman with dyed-blond hair and a chest armor of necklaces listened for a while and then started crying, pressing her face against the skinny man's shoulder to sob mutely. Ana saw it, but said nothing, nor did she offer to translate for Joshua. It was not unlike watching a movie: he was simultaneously there and absent; present, but not responsible for any of it. Ana was sitting close to him again and he could feel the warmth of the thigh, the deep vibrations of her flesh, the hum of her blood on its way to her heart.

“So what you are speaking is the Bosnian language, then,” Joshua said, just to keep her engaged, away from Bega's lamentations.

“It has many names. I call it Bosnian, sometimes I don't like to argue so I say ‘our language.' I much more like to speak English, not complicated.”

“You speak English well,” Joshua said.

“I need to speak better to find better job,” she said. “I don't want to work in chocolate shop whole life.”

Their faces were turned to each other conspiratorially. He smelled her alcoholic breath and he could see himself moving deeper into her space to plant his lips on hers. Kimmy's mouth was sweet, but almost never alcoholic. Alcoholic breath turned him on:
I must kiss you for that
. As if reading his mind, she leaned back, just in time for her husband to walk in and sit across from Bega. They knocked their beer bottles together and drank.

“Your boss seems nice,” Joshua said.

“Very nice,” Ana said. “But she likes to touch me. She stands by me, touches me and says: ‘Oopsie daisy.'”

“Why does she touch you?”

Ana straightened her back, pushing out her chest, and circled her hand around her breasts,
anabashedly
.

“Here,” she said.

The unswallowable lump was back.

“So what do you do about that?”

“I ask her: ‘Why you touch me like that?' And she says: ‘I must make love to you.'”

“That's illegal,” Joshua said. “That's sexual harassment.”

“She is beautiful woman. Maybe many years ago. But now…”

She flung her hand in the direction of Esko, who looked over at them with a cloudy frown of oblivion. Joshua downed his glass of wine and licked the dregs off his lips. It was time to go.

“What do you think I must do?” Ana asked him.

“About what?”

“About Zosya.”

“What do I think? Frankly, I can't think right now,” Joshua said.

He refilled his glass and had some more wine, which had a distinct bouquet of Palmolive dish detergent.

“I don't know what to do,” Ana said.

Joshua leaned to whisper into her ear: “Do it.”

She looked at him in shock, glanced at Esko. “What?”

“Do it,” Joshua whispered, this time barely audibly.

Her cheeks trembled as she smiled, and back they were—the great dimples of Ana.

“I'm kidding,” Joshua said, and she chuckled, knowing he meant it.

*   *   *

For a long while he could not find the keyhole on the bike lock, and then pedaled listlessly on the sidewalk because he was too drunk. More precisely, he was aroused and didn't want to go home, where Kimmy was asleep. The simple fact of his present life was that he was lusting for Ana.
I can kiss you for that
, she said to him.
Do it
, he said to her. He drunkenly recognized that the lust was part of something bigger, of a craving to pursue pleasure unreasonably, beyond the right and wrong, to go as far as his body took him. In the body there is no absolute, or free, will, but the body is determined to desire this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity. She had brought her body to him, she carried it over here all the way from elsewhere. Why shouldn't he dive into it? She should sleep with her boss. He should sleep with her. And, if need be, the boss too. Or whoever else he desired to sleep with. Man must fend off the void with his dick. Why should he go home to be a good boyfriend? The dead end of the Levin syndrome: wanting people to see him as good and loyal, precisely because he was neither good nor loyal. All he had to do was stop caring. Kimmy had her handcuffs and cock rings. What did he have, other than a false, worthless claim to decency? Why should he not be who he really was? Why pretend?
Do it!

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.