The Making of Zombie Wars

 

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The mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body endures.

—BARUCH DE SPINOZA

When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them and it was clear who them was. Today, we're not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there.

—GEORGE W. BUSH

 

The MAKING of ZOMBIE WARS

 

Script Idea #2:
An elderly contract killer with a heart condition is forced to go into retirement after he failed at his last hit. It's his only miss, so when he has a chance to redo it and restore his perfect record, he cannot say no, even if he's risking a heart attack. But then he falls in love with the target's teenage daughter. Title:
The Last Heart

Script Idea #7:
A blind man and a blind woman, attracted to each other by smell. On their first date, they find themselves at a murder scene and catch the killer's particular scent. Nobody believes them, and the perfumed killer is now pursuing them. Title:
Where Do We Go from Nowhere

Script Idea #12:
DJ Spinoza is a misfit no one understands: not his schoolmates, not his friends, not his teachers. His one dream is to DJ at his prom night and blow all those assholes away. After his radical DJ-ing results in a disastrous party at the place of the girl (Rise) he aims to hook up with, he ends up castigated. What will it take to make everyone dance and Rise fall for him? Title:
Spinning Out of Control

 

Now, what could I do with the boy? Joshua asked himself. All human feelings are derived from pleasure, pain, and desire—but most important, Spin could say to Rise, from the beat. And what if he said nothing? What if he was the strong, silent type? Why this and not that? Writing is nothing if not carrying the hopeless, backbreaking burden of decisions devoid of consequences.

Afternoon at the Coffee Shoppe slipped into evening just as Joshua's caffeination reached the heights of the Rwandan plantations where his beverage originated. Hence he was burning to surf the web for Rwanda, learn some interesting facts about other cultures and allow his current creative dilemmas to resolve themselves. Back in the day, before the worldwide web of temptation, there used to be that thing called inspiration. Then the spirit was perpetually displaced by trivia and vanity search. Mercifully, there was no Internet access at the Coffee Shoppe.

Hence Joshua opened up a file with another script in perpetual development (Title:
The Snakeman Blues
), in which a comic-book geek and a retired superhero (the Snakeman), ungainfully employed as a public-school English teacher, team up to fight the evil mayor of Chicago. Joshua was incapable of deciding whether the Snakeman would die at the end or live to go back to teaching—a truly heroic activity in the city of Chicago—and if so, whether he would do so in his human or his serpentine form. The happy ending was corny, while the death was depressing, and Joshua could think of nothing in between. Besides, how exactly would a reptile fight the Chicago Police Department and the devious mayor?

Too hypoglycemic to type a word, which would then perhaps lead to the next word, he could perceive only the blank space below what he'd written last. (Snakeman: Don't! Let's take care of the boss first.) Baruch the Spinner was right: infinity exhausts all reality. But finitude does it too, almost. Joshua stared at the crosswalk outside the Coffee Shoppe where nothing was happening, until he discovered some comfort in devising wisecracks for some imaginary audience at some future dinner party: How is a
shoppe
different from a shop? Did the Wife of Bath drink soy milk chai lattes? Are the Middle English–speaking baristas commonly stricken with black death, et cetera?

He was about to open a new file to log all the shoppe cracks when a pack of ROTC cadets appeared on the Olive Street horizon in fatefully slow motion, reminding him of that long shot in
Lawrence of Arabia
where in the flat-line desert a speck grows into a horseman. The cadets forded the street fake-punching one another, slapping shaven necks, no worry in their lives, save the fear of being expelled from the pack. And then he saw them in the desert, thickly coated in dust, tongue-hanging thirsty on their way to a battle where they would mature and/or heroically die, the nefarious natives offering them contaminated piss-warm water in beaten tin cups. The cadets couldn't begin to conceive of their sandstorming future; they couldn't as much as pity themselves in advance. In fact, they could see little beyond their imminent meal, beyond acting out their childish toughness, beyond playacting hand-to-hand combat at lunch break. He who has a mind capable of a great many things has a body whose greatest part is eternal, wrote Baruch. And out of the sad ROTC mindlessness the scene from
Dawn of the Dead
was recollected in which zombies tottered in circles around a depopulated shopping mall unable to forget their life before their undeath, their infected brains still retaining the remnants of their happy Christmas memories. A chubby cadet sensed the intensity of Joshua's inspired gaze and, as the rest of the corps trundled on to the next-door sandwich shop, stopped to grin at him from the other side of the window. His face was wide, his cheeks flushed, his front teeth of uneven sizes like a skyline, his eyes lit up with the arrogant innocence of youth. In a blissful blink, Joshua saw the narrative landscape neatly laid down before him: all the endless possibilities, all the overhead and wide shots, all the graceful character trajectories blazing across the spectacular firmament, all the expanse conducive to a love interest—all Joshua had to do was stroll through that Edenic symmetry and write it down. This time, he was determined, his vision would not decompose in the computer's memory with the skeletons of his other ideas; he opened, right then and there, a new Final Draft file and created the title page to stare at it:

Zombie Wars

by Joshua Levin

Chicago, March 31, 2003

Whereupon he stared at it.

Alas, unless you're the Lord himself, creation cannot be willed: Joshua needed to eat something before embarking upon it, and hence stood in line behind an overtattooed prick who couldn't decide between banana and pumpkin bread, while the barista in a Che Guevara hat (yet presumably fluent in Middle fucking English) looked on indifferently. The impasse allowed Joshua to imagine a zombie biting into the prick's neck tattoos, blood splashing the ready lattes, turning them pink, the zombie oblivious to the hysterically hissing espresso machine. The revolutionary-Chaucerian barista, artistically striving for the perfect foam, took an eternity to steam the milk for Joshua's cappuccino, giving enough time for the zombie apocalypse to smoothly exhaust its cataclysmic reality and sink to the bottom of Joshua's mind. Back at his shaky table, he sat munching on carrot bread until he reached a Zen-worthy level of caffeine-crash blankness. He closed the file, then the program, and then, finally, his computer, to put it in his bag, to sleep.

*   *   *

Substantial portions of Joshua's life had been wasted before, leaving no trace of trauma or regret. But the pressing problem on this particular Monday was that he needed to turn in some pages to his Screenwriting II workshop(pe?), which was to be conducted that night at Graham's place for the first time. The Birkenstock cocksuckers from the Film Collective were bloodsuckers as well, per Graham, taking a shameless cut of the class fee without bothering to provide enough toilet paper. He'd been paying for it out of his pocket, until he'd concluded that his faithful workshoppers could just as well wipe their asses at his humble abode, while he could keep all the money for himself.

The pageless Joshua, equipped only with the vaguest zombie memories, was thus ensconced in a purple beanbag on Graham's living-room floor. Pretzels and a spacious plastic bottle of defizzed Diet Coke crowded the coffee table. With his testicles squeezed by his twisted underwear, Joshua avoided all eye contact with the beflanelled Dillon, who was outlining some idea of his, hip-deep in the faded, sunken futon. Bega was there too, hunched at the desk in a Mot
ö
rhead T-shirt, contemplating the splendorously lit Wrigley Field in Graham's window. The baseball crowd emitted a home-run roar and Bega grunted wistfully, his thick, unneatly parted gray hair conspicuously rhyming with the grayish shrub on his face. Graham interrupted Dillon's rambling to make a point by sharing a pertinent section from the script he'd just completed.

“‘Blessed be the amateurs!'” Graham spoke in the bloated voice of one of his cardboard characters. “‘The triers, the failers, the shit-swimmers! Let us praise those who dream big and achieve nothing, those undaunted by impossibilities, entrapped by possibilities! They are the dung beetles of the American Dream, the unsung little fertilizers of American soil.'”

Graham rubbed his thumb pensively against his cleft chin as he looked up at his audience for their reaction: Dillon was looming over an open notebook in his lap, writing something down furiously; Bega nodded, chewing his Bic pen to pieces; Joshua was fixated on Graham, but only because his very balls were swelling in the painful squeeze. Addressing the problem required standing up and shoving his hand into his pants to free his testicles from the grip of his underwear. He was not ready for such a commitment, so he endured. The mind can imagine nothing except while the body endures.

“Just so you don't wonder what happens,” Graham continued, “my boy goes on to make it big. He's gonna bottom out at the end of Act Two, but then comes back in Act Three, winning a Golden Globe.”

Joshua tried to reach for his backpack, but the pain in his groin made him gasp and sit back. Graham's living room was overwhelmed with paperbacks—on the shelves, on the floor, on the windowsills—all of them dusty and invested in the magic of film and the science of screenwriting. The only wall without books featured a gigantic poster for
The Godfather: Part II
, Al Pacino looming over them like Jesus in an altarpiece.