Zombie (11 page)

“Is it day or night?” I ask.

Dad rips off the end of an egg roll. “Night,” he says.

“What kind of dark?” I ask.

“Good question,” he says. I love it when he says that. Makes me feel like I’m his only son. “Early morning dark—the darkest before dawn.”

“Like the time of day you usually come home?” I ask. “That kind of dark dawn?”

“It’s early morning,” Dad says, pushing his plate away from him. “Very dark. Stop fucking around. I’m doing our thing here. This is our thing.
Zombie
is our thing. Come on.”

“Where are you in this scenario?”

“I’m dead. Throat ripped out. In my office.”

“What kind of zombies? Are we talking
Night of the Living Dead
zombies?
Planet Terror
, Goo Baby zombies?
White Zombie
zombies?” I ask, laughing.

White Zombie
is technically the first zombie film ever made in 1932 and the zombies in it act more like people who smoked too much weed. Not scary at all. They look like they’re sleepwalking because they’re hypnotized.

“Not
White Zombie
zombies,” he says. “
28 Days Later
. Fast fuckers. Infected. Now. What do you use as your weapon and what is your escape route?” Dad gulps his beer, like he can’t drink fast enough.

I can’t wait for my favorite scene where Cherry Darling has her leg amputated and replaced with a Minigun prosthetic leg to fight off the zombies, but we are nowhere near it. While I’m talking about it, the name
Minigun
is a misnomer. A Minigun is a 7.62millimeter, multi-barrel machine gun that fires 6,000 rounds per minute with rotating barrels. It’s badass. Ain’t nothing mini about it. It’s gigantic as fuck. A megagun, more like it.

“And you can’t say Minigun,” Dad says. “You always say Minigun. Not this time. The zombies are descending the stairs. Go.”

“Baseball bat,” I say.

“Aluminum or wood?”

“Aluminum.”

“Why?”

“A hatchet or handsaw or claw hammer would cause more damage, but I would have to get right up in there to cause damage. Plus, far too messy with all that hacking.” Dad’s tongue comment comes rushing back, but I shake it away. “Wouldn’t want to risk getting that residual blood splatter in my eyes or mouth. If I had time, I’d wear a full body rain slicker too, but does anybody ever really have time to grab the things they need? So I’d use an aluminum baseball bat. This would cause severe disorientation with multiple headshots and I would be using strength, velocity, and distance, rather than just strength. Added bonus—that ping sound. Metal meeting undead body—awesome.”

“Wouldn’t a bat slow you down and wear you out after a while? Think about it. After every swing, you’d have to pull back and wind up. That’s a lot of energy exerted over very minimal aerial coverage.”

“You want to know why a baseball bat is the best weapon out of all non-firearm weaponry? Two words—choke up.” I slide my hands together. “Higher up on the bat you go gives you more speed and power at less exerted force. It’s physics or some shit.”

“But it’s only true to a point. You can choke up some, but at a certain point it’s less power and less force. You understand? And if you go up too far, guess what? It’s less speed, too.” Dad finishes his beer. “Next—your escape route?”

“I’d fight off the first wave and pile their bodies up at the base of the stairs so that the second wave would be met by a barricade of their own undead family. Suck on that.” I pantomime swinging a bat and make a clucking sound with my tongue on contact with the imaginary zombie. I go on for a while about where else I’d go, and what I’d do. I end up talking about it on and off through the rest of the movie. When the credits roll, I ask him where he’d go, what his weapon would be.

Dad sits on the edge of the couch, resting his elbows on his knees. He runs his hands through his thick wavy hair, eyes closed. “I’m too old to run anymore. I’d welcome that kind of change of pace.”

I
wake up on the couch with Dog licking my face and the TV stuck on a bright blue menu screen. Dad is gone again. I know what needs to be done.

In Dad’s office—James Dean, Purple Heart, Jane Mansfield, box of war.

I shuffle through the boxes in Dad’s closet until I find the business of the night. The box of war slides out easy like before. I unflap the top and dig around for the book and plastic case, but nothing new has been added. It’s possible Dad didn’t have time to sneak them into the house and left them in his car, maybe the glove box or under his seat.

Back at his desk, I survey the scene. Everything that had been there yesterday—the sick drawings of body parts wearing neckties, the Christopher’s surgery textbook, and the notes with the names and numbers and dates—had all been removed, disappeared. I opened the desk drawers and knocked my hand around inside. Nothing.

I lift the box of war back onto the shelf and slide it against the wall. I run my hand along the back of the shelving unit, but there isn’t enough space to hide anything back there. I step up onto my toes and feel around on top of the boxes, but also don’t feel anything. Then, there, stacked neatly in the corner on the floor is everything I had hoped to find. Christopher’s textbook of surgery, the notes of information, sickass drawings, and Rembrandt gifts—all out in the open as if to say
fuck you
.

The book—
Notes from Underground
by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

The disc—
Sublimation
.

I read the back of the book and am not entirely sure what it’s all about, but the one piece of information that I retain is that the main character attempts to save a young prostitute named Liza. Dad’s new fake girlfriend. I put the book back on the floor and retrieve the plastic case instead.

I place
Sublimation
in the tray of the living room DVD player. I have no idea how the guts of electronics work but hear our machine working overtime, churning the disc around, searching for a reading or data lines or whatever is imprinted on the burned DVD copy. My insides burn while I wait—my heart, my lungs, my muscles. Now my skin burns too. The DVD player whips the stubborn disc in circles, searching, and then there is a change. The timer on the player begins to roll, measuring time by the second, a bomb in reverse. An electric charge sparks through my organs. What the fuck does
Sublimation
mean? I hold one finger on the pause button and one finger on the fast-forward button, ready to press either one at any moment. I’ve seen enough of Jackson naked over the years. The thought of seeing Dad’s dong or even seeing Dad banging this imaginary whore, Liza—or the thought of Mr. Rembrandt naked—it makes me sick.

The screen flickers. Thin, white lines streak and scroll up from the bottom, horizontally, thin at first, but widening as they reach the top. The lines grow and widen, before cutting back to a soundless black—disappearing. A screen of nothing. The black continues. Then, a buzz breaks into the background, faint, but constant and steady. The buzz, too, fades away and disappears and reveals for the first time actual sound—movement. General movement without words. Like when Dad returned from his walk with Dog—coughing, grunting, walking, moving, breathing, whatever-the-fucking. I punch up the volume and lean in close. The screen still black, a muffled voice speaks in short, clipped phrases. A calm voice. A male voice. A direct voice directing others. The whatever-the-fuck noise in the audio scrambles like tuning in an AM radio station, finally correcting itself, clearing away the cobwebs. Then the voice.

“Some call it
God’s Will
. Others—
Devil’s work
. Some call it
Fate
. Others—
self-directed destruction
. Maybe you prefer
Destiny
. The semblance of it amounts to utter garbage. We live a predetermined life, an inevitable existence. A name matters nothing. What we seek is absolution. What we seek is beyond a higher power. What we seek is reckoning. What we seek is an uncommon valor. A code—this is it and it is all we have—a code. Wholeness. Transgressing without the slowed process of phases. Skip the burn and get right to the healing. Fractured, bitter, endless pieces familiarized into a singular oneness. You. A man. Adam. God’s creation. The first. Fuck Eve. It’s about commitment. Sublimation of spirit. Will. Fate. Destiny. Bullshit. One code. Without it, we are merely base animals. Do we agree?”

A wall of deep and heavy male voices responds, “Yes.”

An electric buzzing begins. A power tool. Far away. In a single tone. Then, it changes. The buzzing changes.

“Gentlemen, let us suppose that man is not stupid. But if he is not stupid, he is monstrously ungrateful! Phenomenally ungrateful. In fact, I believe that the best definition of man is the ungrateful biped. But that is not all, that is not his worst defect; his worst defect is his perpetual moral obliquity.”

The men respond, “Yes.”

The buzzing now screeches—slowing for a moment, before speeding up, ripping through something. I want to press pause and stop this whole thing, but my fingers don’t move or can’t move. The buzzing screeches and screams, ripping and ripping. Silence again. And an uneven breathing, which becomes a wall of whispers.

A new voice, almost invisible, speaks to himself. The man’s voice sounds fragile, frozen, and far closer to the speakers than the other man.

“Jesus Christ, no. I—no—I. I have to—no. Shit. No, no, no.” The man stops talking, but his breath picks back up—fast, heavy, and hard.

Silence resumes, which forces me to search the black screen for something, anything, and then I see it—a thin circle of light at the edges. I touch my finger to the screen and a blue spark shocks me.
I trace my finger along the light.

The main voice continues, “Things finally come down to the business itself, to the act of revenge itself.” Footsteps. Walking. Shoes. Crunching of plastic underfoot. The man’s voice moves closer to the camera now. His tone changes, no longer reciting words, but rather taking registration. “Month—August. Day—Twenty-Nine. Sublimation one—Ralph Andersen.”

There is a dark void of silence. Until an avalanche of sound comes crashing down—a collective primal scream. Who knows how many people are involved, or what it means. The microphone pops and cuts between silence and the communal scream. A reverberating echo pounds the speakers, the screen still black.

A new voice close to the camera says, “Are you a fucking virgin at this? Take the damn cap off.”

Cap. Camera. Someone has forgotten to remove it.

The circle of light disappears as the cap pops off and a hot, bright, white light crashes into the lens, causing the camera to shuffle and refocus, shocking it into disorientation. The communal primal scream now filters through mechanical camera adjustments. Everything blurs and nothing is clear. The scream stops. Choking is all that remains. The choking is violent. Maybe better described as gagging. Like someone having chopsticks shoved down their throat. The robotic sound of the camera autofocusing stops and the white light settles and the white emptiness looks like what I imagine Heaven to be.

The aggressive white rushes away from the camera as color descends. An image comes through in flashes. A man. A man’s body. Thick, industrial plastic covers him like a blurry blanket. Monitors and machines run wires into him, slipping under the plastic; his eyes taped shut; a clear tube stuffed down his throat, chocking him. He is awake. His body twitches. His neck turns, pulling away, gagging, chocking. A seizure, maybe. The way he thrashes under the plastic and the plastic begins to move and slide and gains speed and clears away from the body completely and the anonymous head finally becomes a head with a body and arms and legs.

The man is restrained to the bed. Long, leather straps cross his chest, his stomach, and his knees. The man is fully naked, his junk exposed and all. The body extends out of the frame of the camera, chopping him off at his knees. No one is on camera at all except for the man—only this man in pain.

Two men dressed in pale green surgical scrubs and caps and masks covering their faces poke around the monitors and plunge a syringe into the IV bag. They talk to each other, checking vitals, but their voices are inaudible. They finally exit off screen—doctors of some kind.

The main man’s voice returns. “Oh, absurdity of absurdities!”

Snuff film—is this what I am watching? Is that what this is? No. Snuff films are not this. They are where some dude fucks a chick and then kills her on film for serious pervs to get off on, but this isn’t that. I don’t know what this is. This is something else altogether. I lean forward, lean closer, look closer.

The camera pitches again—autofocusing—and I see them. A crowd stands in front of the man strapped to the bed and the bed is centered on a slightly raised stage. I see them and think it’s a trick of light. I see them, all of them, standing. I hear the man’s voice again.

“… that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper’s trick, that it is simply a mess, no knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties and jugglings, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache.”

The man strapped to the bed gags.

In real life, Dog leaves the living room, sleepy, moving away in a slow walk. I wish I could follow.

The surgical tape over one of the man’s eyes snaps loose, so that one eye remains taped shut while the other is open wide, seeking, searching the room. The eye finds the camera. I tilt my head like people tilt their heads in horror movies, all cliché-like and shit. I try and see the man’s face, like I might know him, like I might be able to identify him for the police or something.

I see them there. Others. Men. Their heads are covered in black masks, like executioners. Some of the men are shirtless. Some in suits. They stand in front of the stage with the bed. They just watch, doing nothing, except for a few that rub their dicks or suck on their fingers.

The main man, the leader says, “This is what redemption looks like, gentlemen. This is the real Ralph Anderson.”