The Making of Zombie Wars (6 page)

Now then, what could Ana be seeing in Joshua?

Back at the Westmoreland, Bega had ardently flaunted his own un-Americanness, complete with
experience
unattainable to the likes of Joshua. Whatever troubles Joshua had gone through to end up on the stool next to Bega were nothing compared with war and displacement and survival and all that heavy stuff. Bega had kept using the phrase
life problems
, which Joshua had previously been inclined to interpret as
the problems inherent in being alive
. According to Bega, however, even if there were different kinds and degrees of such problems, all of them could be reduced to the simple difference between being alive and staying alive. “There are people who just live and there are people who just survive,” Bega had said. “Americans live, we survive.” It'd all been told jokingly and back-slappingly, of course, and Joshua had laughed it up in drunkenness, but it had been undeniable that, as far as Bega had been concerned, Joshua's life was too good to be good enough and that he could never attain the noble title of survivor. Joshua had submitted his survivor grandparents along with thousands of years of anti-Semitic oppression, to claim some legitimacy, but Bega would have none of it—Joshua's fundamental Americanness was all that really mattered. “Your life,” Bega had told him, “is warm blanket.”

But here was a random Tuesday when Joshua's best student, a beautiful woman clearly belonging to the elect Bosnian survivor tribe, appeared interested in him, despite—or perhaps because of?—his warm-blanketness. The magnifying glass of her gaze burned the back of his neck as he was trying to come up with examples of the future perfect less moronic than
Let's Go, America! 5
offered. All he could think of was
By the time the world ends we will all have lived
, but he did not wish to put that up on the chalkboard, lest he look too pretentious, clearing the way for an argument with Captain Stalin. Nonetheless, his waffling was quickly punished.

“Teacher Josh,” Larissa asked, “why you cannot say, ‘I will replace my knees'?”

“You could,” Joshua responded. “But it's much better this way.”

“What is correct?” Captain P needed to know, testily banging at his notebook with a pencil, as if beating a dissident with a shovel handle. “One must be correct. Not two.”

Joshua could hear the rustle of Ana's stockings as she crossed her legs. At the Westmoreland, he'd drunkenly spun into claiming that necessity reigned in the world, a natural and therefore moral order was in place, only for Bega to reassert that Josh's moral system consisted of a little bit of right and a little bit of wrong and a lot of reasonably comfortable—if the order was such, you didn't have to do much, and it rhymed too. “Survivors have no time to dilly-dally,” Bega had said. Perhaps he hadn't used that exact phrase;
dilly-dally
would be a strange idiom for a foreigner to use.

“Both could be correct,” Joshua said. “It kind of depends on the sentence.”

Captain Ponomarenko nodded, slowly, as if all of his expectations of Teacher Josh's failure had once again been met. If it hadn't been for the continued deafening rustle of Ana's stockings, if her perfume had not suddenly floated his way—jasmine was certainly present—Joshua would've dared to further pursue his moot grammatical point. But he could sense that an insurrection was brewing, the Russians soon to be fully mobilized by Captain USSR's susurrous slurs, so he called a break. The students went out to the hallway to stand in a discontented circle where Joshua and his warm-blanket ineptitude would doubtless be the preferred topic. And sure enough, there was an immediate quick fire of derisive laughter. Script Idea #38:
A bizarrely rich Russian oligarch hires an American detective to find out what happened to his parents, who were once upon a time arrested by Communists as American spies; as the mystery deepens, the detective pairs up with a beautiful Russian woman; they discover that the Soviets sold the parents' organs on the underground market; the oligarch wants the organs in order to clone his parents; adventures follow.

Teacher Josh closed the door and embarked upon wiping the chalkboard, sneezing occasionally. The vagaries of the future perfect and Ana's presence had allowed him to forget temporarily that he'd had to escape from his place and now stayed with Kimmy, the woman who hoarded cock rings and handcuffs. Erasing the future perfect from the board, he couldn't escape what had happened. He didn't hear Ana come in.

“Teacher Josh,” she said. He turned around and immediately noticed that her nipples were hard. Looking into her eyes, sea green as they were, required effort.

“Can I talk with you?” She even spoke in a rustly, deep voice.

“Yes,” he said. “You may.”

“There is party,” she said. A dimple in her left cheek appeared and disappeared without anything else in her face changing.

“A party,” Joshua said.

“Saturday in the evening.”

“Saturday evening.”

“What?”

She was confused and glanced, possibly out of habit, at the blank board. He regretted his condescension, but then it allowed him to spend time looking at her: at her carmine lips, at her jawline, at her perfect nose, at the dimple mirage.

“You can say: Saturday evening,” he said.

“Okay. Saturday evening there is a party,” she said. “Many friends, many Bosnians. Also students from here.”

“What is the party for?” Joshua asked. She had the habit of readjusting her bra by pulling up the straps and straightening her shoulders. Her breasts leapt up like happy little animals.

“It is my birthday.”

“Well, happy birthday! May I ask how old you are?”

“If you want to know, you must come.”

“To your party?”

“To my party.”

The implicit requirements of the committed relationship Joshua was pursuing with Kimiko assumed spending Saturday nights together for the purposes of intimacy. It should've been easy for him to say no to Ana. He didn't even need to explain.

“I don't know,” he said. “It might be hard.”

He was conscious of avoiding mention of Kimmy to Ana, conscious that he was thereby involved in negotiations.

“On Saturday you will have had fun,” she said, and the dimple doubled—both of her cheeks were adorned with one—because she pursed her lips slightly, for an instant. It could've been just a twitch, certainly unconscious, or she could've been innocently proud of being clever, but to Joshua it looked like a conspiratorial signal, a hint of a kiss. He wasted the time he should've used to say no in an attempt to swallow a huge lump in his throat: at first it went down, but then it came back up tumescent. Ana, however, used that time to write down her phone number in the margin of
Let's Go, America! 5.
She shouldn't have done it, she shouldn't have so brazenly violated the good book. Her insouciance was sexy.

Captain Ponomarenko must have mocked Teacher Josh again, because choral laughter echoed out in the hallway. Joshua fixed his gaze on the map of Israel on the far wall, pretending to be reviewing in his head his Friday schedule. The lump bobbed in his throat. Was she flirting with him? Or leaving the door temptingly ajar for him to walk through? He could see Jerusalem, the largest dot on the map.

“I'll see what I can do.”

“There will be music,” she said. “It will have been fun.”

“It will be fun,” he corrected.

“Yes, it will be lot of fun.”

Joshua swallowed the lump, and this time it didn't come back up, settling in his stomach as a steel ball. Ana took her seat, smiling coyly at him, as if they were now bound by a shared secret. Captain P walked in and grinned, recognizing in his infinite KGB wisdom a potentially illicit exchange.

“Teacher Josh,” Captain Ponomarenko said. “Happy First April!”

*   *   *

Ah, Joshua, the ever lost boy! He'd never been properly seduced before. Back in college, doing J
ä
germeister shots until all the inhibitions were sufficiently suppressed had been the main format for his carnal negotiations. More recently, his relationship with Kimiko had progressed unnoticeably from quick friendship to sleeping together. As far as Joshua could remember, there had been few seductive signals exchanged between them prior to commitment, little flirtation, no arousingly ambiguous suggestions. Eight months earlier, they'd spent a long weekend in Linda's vast Door County cottage, their rooms the only two in the basement. He'd been pursuing Linda, and hence accepted her invitation to Wisconsin thinking that she might finally end up being responsive, or at least horny. But the sleeping arrangement suggested that Linda had set them up so as to deflect him. Everyone had driven up on Friday evening; on Saturday Kimmy would eat sausage links off his breakfast plate, dip her bun in his yolk, as Linda grinned approvingly; in the afternoon, Kimmy would snuggle up to him on the sheepskin by the fireplace. On Sunday night she'd sneak into his room and slip into his bed equipped with a condom. They'd drive back to Chicago together on Monday, making plans for the following weekend, devoid of Linda, just the two of them—they would go to see
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
. Thus they had coupled. They never mentioned Linda.

Riding a bus back (home?) to Kimiko's after class, he parsed the exchange with Ana, analyzing all the expressions of her conspicuous interest, which in turn became an elaborate fantasy, featuring his hand crawling up the inside of Ana's thigh and into her wet depths, touching the dot she'd drawn so vividly. So possessed was he with the possibility of Ana's seducing him that he walked past Kimiko's to Stagger's place, managing to stop himself just before touching the front door handle. He went back up Magnolia, hoping that Kimiko would not be home, or that she'd be at least asleep, so he could regain his bearings. But she was home, watching
The Daily Show
, curled up on the sofa under a very small Wisconsin-made quilt.

 

 

INT. RESTAURANT — DAY

Restaurant patrons devour their food, indifferent to their surroundings. DOUG (42) looks out the window. We cannot see his face but he wears a leather jacket over suit and tie. Outside, the sky is gray. Doug drinks his wine, refills the glass, absentmindedly watching a plastic bag flutter down a desolate street. An army convoy ROARS by, an occasional shot is heard, along with wailing sirens. Nobody pays any attention to what is going on outside, except for Doug. He lights a cigarette. By the way he inhales, it's clear that it's an oh-fuck-it! one, his first after a long time.

The kitchen door swings open and a waiter, evidently zombified, stumbles out, his white jacket stained with blood and brains. The waiter heads toward Doug, who gets up, toppling over the wine bottle, and retreats in horror.

DOUG

No! No! God! No!

He flicks the cigarette at the waiter. The waiter corners him, then bites into his face. Blood spurts out of the hole where Doug's nose used to be. All the other patrons are petrified, only to lurch out of their seats and rush out the door. BOY (9) screams:

BOY

Flesheaters! Flesheaters!

The waiter feeds on Doug's brain. An explosion destroys the restaurant, blowing the plastic bag away.

 

Joshua hated sleeping, but waking up was worse. Nightmares were not the problem: he never really had any. Nobody ever bothered to chase him in his dreams; he never plunged from a tall building to wake up just before exploding like a pomegranate, nor did he ever experience even the vaguest presence of death. There was little violence, only occasional vanilla sex, his dreams damp rather than wet, his subconscious a Wilmette where he was forever sleepily immortal. Still, he would wake up sweating, his heart thumping. What caused his torment was that the dreams were inconclusive; they did not so much end abruptly as they whimpered their lame way into his wakeful state; the absence of notable transition was the troubling thing. Baruch thought that whatever is, is either in itself or in the other. Well, Joshua's dreams were neither one nor the other.

Some weeks before, he'd found himself enmeshed in a dream conundrum of laundry separation: he couldn't decide whether his long johns were to be put on the underwear pile or the pants pile. When he'd woken up, furious and still undecided, he'd stuffed all his long johns in a garbage bag with the intention of getting rid of them. Just as he'd been about to drop the bag into the gaping mouth of a malodorous black bin, a flurry had descended from the gray heights to linger before his nose, reminding him that Chicago winters were ruthless and long.

The terrible inconclusiveness seriously impeded his will to rise. As soon as the dream residues dissolved into full oblivion, a terrible doubt would start forming, weighing on his intestines, concentrating in globs in his muscles, so that he kept tossing in search of a position comfortable enough for snoozing. The painful doubt would swell like a balloon, steadily squeezing out of his head all that he'd seemed to have accomplished or thought up theretofore.

This morning, all of the love for Kimmy, painstakingly accrued, all of their earned closeness, was transformed into a sense of entrapment, enhanced by her sleeping quietly, romantically next to him, a warm pile of a stranger's flesh. He pretended to sleep until Kimmy left for work, leaving an indentation on the pillow and a single long, whorled hair. Therein was a trace of the woman he was supposed to love; he had all the reasons to love her; he'd bragged about her to others: his Zen mistress, brash, self-sufficient, and prone to kinkiness (yet to be fully exploited). But he now found comfort in her absence; he liked the idea of her, but her presence—sometimes, presently—made him want to be alone. A desire that arises from joy is stronger, other things being equal, than one that arises from sadness.

Then there was the Stagger incident, the fact that he'd had to escape from his apartment, hadn't dared to call the police, and had entirely failed to be sufficiently aggressive and angry. A better man would kick Stagger's ass, hurt him terribly. Revenge is a dish best served with carpet bombing. But what Joshua wanted was for all of it to simply resolve itself, as it undoubtedly would, without his having to do anything radical. Somehow, someday, it must be resolved.