The Making of Zombie Wars (20 page)

“Don't Jan me! Talk!”

And he talked, necessarily omitting certain salacious details. But he let the story come out of him as it was, relating in spurts and
umm
s its confusion and twists and the absence of a comprehensible narrative arc. He did own up to the fact that Ana's husband—as well as Kimmy—was justified in being severely pissed. “Acts were committed,” he admitted. “Feelings were hurt.” His honesty made him want to vomit. If he lived through this, he would never stop lying. He rolled the window down, then rolled it up. Rolled it down, rolled it up. Down, up. Seven times up, eight times down.

“You haven't been my little brother since you were my little brother, Jackie, but it seems to me you're fucking it up big time here,” Janet said.

“Janet! Language!” Mom said. She used to have a swear jar: Janet and Joshua had had to put in a quarter each time they'd uttered a curse word. They'd never found out how she spent it. The heyday of Janet's teenagehood would've paid for a vacation in France.

“Shut the fuck up, Rachel!”

Mom rolled her eyes at the language. It was her default gesture of helplessness—she rolled her eyes through her marriage and divorce; she'd probably roll them at the Messiah.

“Listen, Janet—” Joshua interjected.

“No, you listen, Joshua. I know what I said about Ms. Mitsubishi—”

“Matsushita,” Joshua said.

“Okay, Matsushita. The point is: she's good for you. She's a serious person.”

It had never been clear to Joshua why Janet disliked Kimmy. He used to think they'd get along splendidly, being professional successful women and all, but something had gone very wrong at some point, which point Joshua had entirely missed.

“This is a great pie, ma'am,” Stagger said from the back.

“Thank you,” Janet said, not bothering to look at him. Ana was looking out at Magnolia: the barely budding brown trees, the somber tendrils of April grass, Kimmy's orderly porch. Stagger and Alma kept eating the pie, as if it were a wedding cake.

“It is not his fault—” Ana said.

“Please stay out of this,” Janet said.

“We had passion,” Ana said.

“Passion?” Janet scoffed. “Passion is a fragrance brand.”

“What's done cannot be undone,” Joshua said.

“Yes it can!” Janet shouted. “It can be undone. Everything can be undone. Go back in there and fall on your knees and undo it. Tell her that this woman”—she pointed at Ana—“drugged you and raped you. Tell her it wasn't you who did it. Tell her you'll never do it again. Show some leadership. Un-fucking-do it!”

“The cat is dead,” Stagger said, his mouth full of rhubarb pie.

“Excuse me?” Janet said.

“The cat is dead,” Stagger repeated, having swallowed.

“What cat?”

“Kimiko's cat. It's in the duffel bag. Which is in the house,” Stagger said. “I reckon the cat is a huge problem for Jonjo. In this particular situation.”

“The cat?” Janet turned to look out the windshield at a winter-exhausted squirrel that froze halfway up a tree.

“Curiosity didn't kill the cat. It was Ana's crazy husband,” Stagger said, and Alma giggled. She was a little patient, Joshua thought, growing up to be a very big one.

The squirrel spiraled speedily around the tree trunk, first down, then up, as if remembering something important—it must have been the absence of the cat, the gratuitous freedom. Janet started slamming the steering wheel with the palms of her hands. Many years ago, during an apocalyptic teenage tantrum, she'd smacked Joshua's aquarium with a soup ladle, then proceeded to crush with her foot the tropical little fish flapping on the floor.

“What is it with you people!?” she hollered. “Why is every single man in my life a fucking idiot? Why can't you just quietly go about ruining your life without getting me involved? I don't want to deal with your dead goddamn cat in the middle of my fucking separation!”

She pounded at the steering wheel with terrifying fury, the SUV shaking. When she stopped, the soundless aftermath was even more terrifying.

“Okay,” Janet whispered. “Everybody out.”

Alma opened the door and stepped out instantly, as if she'd been waiting for the command all along. Stagger had a hard time getting out, what with his broken arm, but Alma helped him. Joshua stored away the weirdness of their quickie friendship for a future better understanding.

“Thank you for the pie, ma'am!” Stagger said.

“You're welcome,” Janet said. “Should've poisoned it.”

The backseat was covered with pie debris. Joshua was reluctant to leave the car, because he didn't want to be outside, exposed. At some point in human history, someone somewhere thought of making rhubarb pie. How does humanity arrive at such decisions? If there is no God, who made the first rhubarb pie? Mom nodded understandingly, approving of Janet's instructions. Back in their adolescence, Janet and Joshua had conducted long debates trying to determine which one of them had been better loved and understood by their mother. In the end, they split the difference: Joshua had been better loved and Janet better understood.

“Out. All of you. Get out,” Janet repeated.

“Janet!” Mom pleaded. Ana opened the door and stepped out.

“Enjoy rest of your day,” Ana said, unsarcastically. She was hard to hurt, Joshua realized, because she must've been hurt hard. It was then that he recognized that what happened between them couldn't just be about sex. She was right: the transaction had not been completed. There was more.

“You too, Rachel! Get the hell out,” Janet barked.

Joshua still could not move, but Ana held on to the door handle, keeping it open for him, and he followed her out.

“Out, Rachel!”

Mom got out, grunting. Stagger offered his broken hand to help her descend from the SUV's high step. The moment she landed back on earth, Mom turned to Joshua and gave him a scolding look—many years ago, that look would've meant no movies for the rest of the school year. Janet shifted into gear and drove away.

“Janet did it again,” Joshua said.

“Oh no, Joshua Levin, you did it again,” Mom said. “And it's the best one so far.”

“Fuck off, Mom,” Joshua said.

She was just about to roll her eyes when Kimmy's screams arrived from the house to bang on everyone's eardrums. She must have discovered the most valuable thing in the world.

 

 

INT. BASEMENT LAB — NIGHT

Woman, wearing latex gloves, prepares a syringe. She sucks something out of a petri dish with it. She pushes the air out of the syringe, taps on it. She turns around to face a cage, with Boy in it, obviously zombified, MOANING with hunger. Major Klopstock sleeps in the other cage, but its door is open. Woman approaches Boy's cage. When he reaches for her between the bars, she grabs his hand at the wrist to avoid his long nails and plunges the needle into his forearm. Boy HOWLS as she empties the syringe, thrashing around in horrible pain. Then he stops. Woman watches him. The undead Boy looks pretty dead, his overgrown hair spread around his head like a halo. Woman closes her eyes in defeat and takes off her latex gloves. She looks over to Major K's cage. His sleep is so deep it looks like he might never wake up.

 

Joshua was in the dark at the bottom of the stairs; up at the top there was light. He needed to climb toward it, but Bushy dug his claws in his calf, clinging to it as he stepped on the next stair. Joshua smacked him to shake him off, but Bushy kept clawing up his leg, progressing toward his eyes with the intention of scratching them out. If Joshua could reach the light, Bushy would be burned by it like a louse with a cigarette, and Joshua would be safe. But he also didn't want to kill Bushy. The only thing he could do, scared and angry, was ascend in the hope that the situation would resolve itself. Before it did, he woke up.

*   *   *

His first fully conscious thought was of Kimmy, and the plain truth presented itself to him: he hurt her, callously. She put her love and trust in him, and he wagged his dick at it all, betraying her. From here on in, whenever she thought or spoke of him she'd have a gut-tearing feeling in her stomach; like a memory of food poisoning, he'd be to her. Where there had been love, now there would be hatred, and hideous stomach cramps. She would have no compunction telling all of their friends—her friends, really—about the sordid magnitude of Joshua's assholeness. For as long as she lived, there would be at least one person in the world—and likely many more—considering Joshua lesser than a salmonella bug. It was a problem: the
goyter
of her judgment would forever bulge out of his neck, forcing his head to bow.

Then he thought of Bernie and his evil cells; but then, he couldn't think about that right now. There was nothing he could do now; not even call Janet. Bernie was a big boy, able to fend for himself until Joshua recovered.

He heard the bedroom door opening; the toes on the floor, the pee twinkle in the toilet. He could tell it was Ana: the self-effacing care not to wake him up; the discomfort in her step; the grace. She was hurt too. With how many layers of hurt has the Lord encrusted us?

In one of Joshua's half-ass scripts a scientist, Dr. Oldenburg, discovered gateways between many parallel universes, where the same events took place, only with slight delays. Dr. Oldenburg figured out how to transport himself between the universes, effectively traveling in time, which came in handy when he had to prevent the death of the woman he loved. But then he discovered that the number of universes was infinite, as was the number of differences among them. Dr. Oldenburg was a superhero in one universe and helpless in another—to save his beloved he had to find the right universe.
The Right Life
, the script was called. It didn't work because all of the worlds were tediously confusing, the differences among them obsessively minimal and thus boring. Also, he never got anywhere near finishing it. But now, who knows?

He pretended to be sleeping as she was making her way back to the bedroom.

He heard her stop and he knew she was looking at him, perhaps hoping he'd be awake. What did she see? A salmonella man in his thirties, sleeping on a sofa in a T-shirt and underwear. There was at least one way to measure the quality of a life: if you slept on a sofa in your own apartment at the age of thirty-three, things were not going well. She stood there (where, exactly?) for a while and Joshua made himself stay so still that he endured a beastly itch spreading all over his scalp down to his spine, or whatever was left of it. Just as he gave in and decided to scratch his dandruff off to the point of bleeding, she slipped back into the bedroom. He'd once seen a hair-care commercial in which one of the ecstatic shampoo users was identified as a dandruff survivor.

An hour later he attempted to open the bathroom door but it was locked. He tried again, baffled by the resistance. For a moment, it seemed he was inside one of his dream traps, but then he heard gasps and yelps and thought it was Ana crying. He removed his hand from the knob, because he didn't want to deal with her tears. Ana, however, came out of the bedroom wearing his blue button-up linen shirt. Where did she find it? It was a summer shirt, displaced deep in the back of his closet.

“I was cold,” Ana said, holding her elbow like John Wayne.

“It's okay,” Joshua said. Her short hair was all messed up and stood up in spikes. For the first time he noticed its stubborn thickness, rhyming with the fat dark lines of her eyebrows. “I think your daughter is in the bathroom.”

“She will have been there whole day,” Ana said.

Joshua knocked on the door, just to make sure Alma knew they were outside, that her mother could now hear her crying. How exactly have I ended up here, he thought, outside a bathroom of tears? Alma came out, wearing only a skimpy top and panties, her puppy breasts protruding. He could smell her: she reeked of morning adolescence, of glands and hormones, of nascent adult loneliness. She skipped by him, flashing a smile that he would have thought effortless had he not heard her sobs. Maybe she wasn't crying but moaning with pleasure. He discarded the thought as obscene and double-locked the door behind him.

He peed facing the foxhunt painting. There was a bird perched in the crown of one of the trees, watching with indifference the fox's struggle. Joshua had never seen the bird before, even if scanning the picture had been part of his pissing ritual since he'd been in this apartment. What kind of bird was it anyway? A nightingale? He had no idea what nightingales looked like. Because they live at night, obviously—no one ever sees birds at night. The bird was brownish and hard to see, small and separate from the busyness of the hunt. Why would the painter hide a nightingale in the painting? There were worlds of living creatures Joshua would never see, still trusting blindly that they actually existed. He heard Ana and Alma argue in Bosnian outside. Maybe it wasn't a nightingale. Maybe it was a buzzard waiting for the fox to go down. He had seen a buzzard, in Arizona, once: an ugly, filthy, bald bird. Maybe this was a British buzzard: restrained, classy, bland, like the queen or the dead what's-her-name's prince husband. Script Idea #163:
The princess leaves Whatever Palace for some night fun—say, to meet her youngish lover—but then she finds him dead. Muslim terrorists tortured him to get the info that would allow them to get to her. Now they're after her. Meanwhile, a ruthless tabloid reporter follows the scent of the royal rat. The princess's only help: a handsome London cabbie, whose name is Will. Title:
Will of the People.

Joshua shook off his willy and studied his face in the mirror. There was a subcutaneous pimple developing in the corner where his nostril met his face—highly unsqueezable. Yet he bent his nose and pressed his sharpest nail against the minuscule protuberance. Willy and the princess fall in temporary love. But once she's back in the palace, there is no way Willy could replace the jug-eared, dull prince. Miraculously, the pimple popped. Willy now knows far too much—he has seen her sitting on the toilet, which few mortals ever have. MI5
+
2, a supersecret agency, dispatches assassins after him. His only hope: the princess herself. The sequel title:
Triumph of the Willy
.