The Making of Zombie Wars (15 page)

“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 cold 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.”

“Somebody, somewhere has such a life, even if it's not you. You've got to believe that. That's what the pursuit of happiness is all about.”

She didn't understand, but she was used to not understanding what was said in English. She stood up to loom over him. She was a brave woman. It took courage to sail over here from some fucked-up elsewhere. It took courage to have sex with your English teacher, to follow through with your desires, wherever they might take you. Joshua had desired often, but seldom followed through. He'd always waited for the first move to come from the lusted-after. Ana fixed her hair, raking it with her fingers. Joshua loved that it was hennaed, that it wasn't real, that he didn't know what the real color of her hair was. She was true to herself by being different from herself.

“What's your real hair color?” he asked.

“White.”

“Gray.”

“No. White.”

“We say gray hair. Not white hair. Even if it's white.”

“We. Who is this we? You and your girlfriend?”

“Americans.”

All of Joshua's sex fantasies were about that first move: young women spreading legs on the El to exhibit the shimmer of their moist vaginas; married women moving their manicured hands along the inside of his thigh, from his knee to his dick, while sitting across the dinner table from their innocent husbands; tipsy best girlfriends in the elevator offering a threesome between the fifth and tenth floors. The aphrodisiac of someone else's courage.

“We can't do this, Ana. I can't do it. I have a girlfriend. I've got problems. I've got happiness to pursue.”

“What does it mean
pursue
?”

“Chase.”

She grabbed her coat out of his closet. The hanger swung and then fell; she picked it up. He wanted to tell her it didn't matter: things land where they fall; things eventually take care of themselves.

“Teacher Josh, don't be afraid. I will not have tell to your girlfriend. I understand.”

“Thank you,” Joshua said. He waited for her to say something else, to blame him or to shrug this whole thing off as merely sex. But she put her high-heel shoes on and thus fully resumed the shape he'd known from the classroom. There was no noise downstairs and a bubble of hope floated to the surface of the present: what if Stagger was gone, from his apartment, from this building, from Joshua's life?

“Do you know my last name?” Ana asked.

“Of course I do. You're in my class,” Joshua said. “It's difficult to pronounce, though.”

“But that's from my husband. Do you know my real last name?”

“No,” Joshua said. It had never occurred to him that she'd had a life before what she was now.

“It is Osim,” she said. “It means: ‘except.'”

“Except?”

“Yes. Like, everybody except me.
Svi osim mene.
”

She bent over to kiss him on the forehead. “I will not go to your class no more. By the time you forget Ana Osim, you will have had good life. With everybody except me.”

She walked out without looking back and closed the door. It surprised him that he felt no regret, no loss. The stasis was instantly restored, even with Joshua there, the ceiling fan perfectly motionless. The hook was still there, but he was now relaxed. He picked up a pair of clean underwear from the floor and put it on. My soul, return to your resting place, because the Lord has rewarded you.

*   *   *

The moment he stepped off the last creaking step, before he could even touch the front lock, Stagger's door opened. This time, Stagger donned an untied bathrobe, tiny spectacles on the bridge of his nose, as if he'd just been reading small-print poetry. In his hand, however, there was a long samurai sword. There were shards on the floor as far as Joshua could see inside his apartment. He glanced at Stagger's feet expecting them to be shredded, but he wore a pair of frog-green Crocs.

“How was it?” Stagger asked.

“How was what?”

“Rolling in the hay with Ana. How was it? Good? Sounds like you've got some techniques, Jonjo.”

“None of your business.”

Stagger poked Joshua's duffel bag with the tip of the sword, as if to inspect it. Joshua pressed his back against the wall, closely monitoring the sword, now between the door and him. Strangely, he was not afraid—he was, rather, going through the habitual motions of fear, as if he had yet to learn to live without it.

“It has to be my business, because you were banging away up there,” Stagger said. “All I was trying to do in my humble corner was enjoy some relaxing music.”

He casually leaned on the sword like Fred Astaire on a cane.

“You let her up there. You let her into my place without my permission. That was none of your business.”

“I was just being your friend, Jonjo! I'm the kind of guy who'd do anything for his buddies.”

“Could you put that sword away, please?” Joshua asked. “It looks ridiculous.”

Stagger looked at the sword in his hand as if he'd just discovered it was there and liked it too.

“Would you like to step in?” Stagger said. “Hang out?”

“You're a fucking freak, Stagger! I need to go now.”

“I'm a freak? Look who's talking! Don't you have a girlfriend? One Kimiko Motherfucking Home? Would she be familiar with your techniques?”

Stagger now started throwing the sword up and then catching it by the blade. Joshua foresaw his hand being cut, but evidently Stagger had practiced, making a face as if to say: “How about this?”

“I'm moving out,” Joshua said.

“When?”

“This instant.”

“Your lease is not up yet.”

“I don't care. I'm out.”

“I'm gonna have to keep the deposit.”

“Keep the damn deposit. In fact, keep all of my stuff. I'll just send someone for the books.”

“Come on, Jonjo,” Stagger said, still holding the sword by the blade. “I like having you around.”

“I'm out. It was fun while it lasted.”

Stagger squeezed the blade and a trickle of blood spread along it.

“Maybe you want to keep a place for screwing your lady friend on the sly? I'll lower the rent. You can tell Kimiko you moved out. It could be your love den. How about that?”

“It's over, Stagger,” Joshua said and pushed past him to open the door.

“Let's just have some beer and discuss it like men!” Stagger said. He followed Joshua onto the porch and then down the steps. “Hey! Jonjo! Don't go! I'm your buddy!”