Zombie (25 page)

“What if I do want to get serious?”

“For Christ’s sake, don’t ever tell her that,” he says. “Monogamy is like a knife wound that’ll bleed you dry until there is nothing left, but skin and bones and regret.”

“Lovely,” I say. “You really should go into business for yourself.
Spread your sage advice around a little bit. I’d hate to hoard it all myself.”

I direct Zink through my neighborhood, pointing out the massive potholes left behind from the winter ice storm, where the road at the top of certain hills makes heavier cars bottom out. He makes the final turn onto my street and pulls up in front of my house, behind my father’s BMW. Ballentine’s prized BMW is parked rightly in front of my very own house. The fucker is home.

“My dad,” I say.

“You good?” Zink asks. “You need me to come in with you? I can. I’m good with parents. They love me.”

“Zink,” I say. “I have a question for you, but I don’t know how to phrase it.”

“Try.”

“Why would you tell me that you knew that I knew about Paul, but then come to the mixer tonight and try and bag some girl?”

“Go on—you can say it.”

“If you’re gay, then I want you to be gay. I don’t want you to hide it from me.”

“Remember when I said I wasn’t nervous about you telling anyone about me because you were an honest person?” He looks at me but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Well, not everyone is an honest person. Actually, very few people are honest people. This is my survival technique, Barks.
It gets better
, you know?”

“Like in those campaigns?” I ask.

“Like in your zombie movies. There are rules that people live by to stay alive.”

“Codes,” I say.

“Exactly,” he says.

W
ater rushes through pipes. A creak escapes the wood in the floor. The living room and office and bedrooms and kitchen and dining room are empty except for the fucking cherubs. Dad is nowhere to be found and I wonder briefly if the cherubs came to life and devoured his brain. Maybe he took the light rail downtown. Maybe he planned on drinking and didn’t want the responsibility of driving home.

In my bedroom, I kick off my shoes and start to change when I hear something, a groan—guttural and low. I hear it again—inside the house somewhere far below. I pull on my jeans and shirt and descend the stairs, stepping slowly, one foot at a time, measured and accurate. The groan echoes clear like someone forcing something poisonous out of their body. I can’t locate the noise but hear it again, louder, getting louder, every time growing. Louder, louder, coming from below. From the basement.

I open the door to the basement and flip the light switch, but the light doesn’t turn on. I hear the groan again. I step down the soft carpet of the stairs to the cold cement basement floor. The groan grows again. The basement is empty except for Dad’s tools, a rusted bike leaning against the wall. Dog is nowhere to be found. Deeper into the basement, the darkness intensifies. Classical music. Orchestral music. A symphony plays. Heavy drums. Big brass. The groan goes again, echoing louder, coming from the room where Dad keeps all of his hammers and wrenches and clamps and saws. I pull the cord and a crude light cuts into my eyes. The bulb swings in a circle, hung from a wooden beam in the ceiling.

Finally, I see him.

Dad sits on a metal stool, still, knees bent, feet on the floor. His hands press palm down on his workbench, a handsaw and hatchet between them. The pruning shears Mom uses to cut dead limbs from trees in the spring lays at his feet. Dad does not speak. Cymbals crash and some deep-sounding string instruments hum. His hair curls and twists in every direction, as though he has been running his hands through it. He wears a white collared shirt, unbuttoned, and creased black pants. No tie. No Windsor.

“Dad?”

He breathes in controlled repetition, even movements, exhaling and inhaling. His eyes lock on the tools at the table.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

He opens his mouth, his lips peeling apart from dryness like dead skin. Wide. Wider still. The noise. The black groan—that deep, sick sound—rolls up and out of his body. He forces the noise out, pushing it from his gut. His eyes fill with water.

“Dad? DAD?”

The groan rolls again, louder this time. His chest lifts. His head tips down. He flexes his stomach muscles, forcing the noise—that awful gut-busted groan—out, again and again. He looks back to his tools.

“Dad?” I move closer to him See, in the swinging shadows, blood on the collar and cuff of his shirt. I don’t see any cuts or other blood stains. I almost touch him to feel his skin, but don’t out of fear.

His head turns to me, eyes hold mine in place.

“Get out of here. Jeremy. Go.” His voice is not his voice.

“Dad. What’s wrong? What is it?”

“Jeremy.”

“DAD. I’m calling someone … shit, Dad.”

“Get out of here.” Dad pushes me away with one hand, knocking me to the floor.

I land in the doorway, the air knocked out of me.

Dad steps toward me and slaps the bare light bulb to the side.
Dull light shrouds his face in darkness. The tools out in front of him change shapes in shadows. More blood is visible on his shirt, but only in the moments when light crosses him as the bulb spirals.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he says. “Leave.” He sits back down at his workbench. The music fades out, but only long enough to make you think it is over before it begins again. A new piece with more brass, more strings, and heavy percussion rises up.

I run from the basement, the light bulb settling into a tiny tornado twirl from the wooden beam in the ceiling. I don’t turn back. I skip steps, moving fast to my bedroom. My chest burns where Dad pushed me.

Another groan rips from the pit of the house, a growl.

It echoes inside the walls.

At my bed. On my knees.

Hands together. At my chin.

Eyes shut tight. Blocking out the world.

Our Father. Who art in Heaven. Hail Mary. Please, Mary, please.

I
sit with my back against my bedroom door—
28 Days Later
on the other side. I open my cell phone and call Mom, but her line goes dead, disconnected. This fucking family and their cell phones, I swear. I call Jackson and he answers.

Loud music swallows his voice and I can’t make out a damn thing he says, except for the word
Roscoe
. He says a bunch of inaudible words before chanting a cheer, like at a baseball game. “Roscoe. Ros-coe. Ros-coe. Ros-coe.”

“Jackson? Can you hear me? I’m coming down to see you,” I say. “I need your help.”

More inaudible mumblings and music. “Jackson? Can you hear me?”

“Let’s do another one, baby,” he says. “Excuse me, Hot Bartender? Another round.”

“Jackson?”

“I can’t hear you loud and clear, Jeremy. Please stop calling me,” he says, before the line cuts out.

I scroll through my numbers but can’t find anyone else. There is no one else in my life that is capable of helping, interested in listening, stable enough to cope. My breathing gets away from me like I’ve been running sprints. I scroll through for any name that I recognize, but most of them are family.

Then I come to one name I recognize. A new name. I dial and can’t believe I am dialing. The phone rings and doesn’t go right to voicemail like I want it to and expect it to and my alarm clock says it’s recently 2
A.M.
, but I keep the call going anyway, until she picks up.

“Please don’t hang up,” I say.

“Jeremy,” Aimee says. “Are you okay?” She sounds like she was asleep. I wonder what she’s wearing.
Tits
. Why am I thinking about tits right now? Jesus.

“I didn’t know,” I say.

“Are you okay?” she asks. “This isn’t a perverted phone call, is it? Because you’re breathing heavy like maybe you’re being perverted.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called.”

“You couldn’t wait three days?”

“What do you mean?”

“You think girls don’t know about boys waiting three days to call a girl? We know. BTW, girls don’t all want serious relationships either.”

“I was going to call tomorrow.”

“Some of us
never
pick up a phone unless we want to. Some of us just let it ring.”

“I was going to call tomorrow and make plans. For dinner. You want to go to dinner?”

“How about tea? You like tea?” she asks.

“Tea sounds good.”

“Call me tomorrow, like you planned, and we’ll pick a place. And for God sakes, calm down—you’re going to hyperventilate if you keep breathing so fast.”

I hang up and hear another moan and move to my closet and pull down a board game box. I grab a bunch of magazines and toss them into a backpack along with my phone. From the trash can, I pull an aluminum baseball bat. Time to sweep the house.

Zombie Survival Code #4: Lock-and-Load.

The house is a ghost, empty and moaning. The stairs creak under my steps. Dog hears me and trots to the front door, wagging her tail, waiting for me. She follows me as Dad moans some more and I walk to the basement door, my bat up off my shoulders, ready to swing. I choke up on the handle for good measure.

He speaks softly now, saying, “One, two three. One, two three. One, two three.” Another moan, louder still. He stops, no longer
counting, but quiet. He appears at the bottom of the stairs with dead eyes, looking up at me.

I grab the leash from Dad’s office and snap it on Dog’s collar. She walks figure eights behind me. Dad’s closet door is open. So is his box of war. Like a magnet I am drawn to it. I approach and tip up on my toes to peek into its gut. The maps and photos and canteen are all still there. And so is the gun. I grab it and hold it in my hand, reintroducing myself to its texture and weight. This is Dad—the gun. His defense. Not me. I have my bat. I drop the gun back into the box, kick the closet closed and leave the house.

Dog trots next to me in the street as we make our way to the light rail station, under the cover of night, anonymous and alone.

Like Ballantine in Vietnam.

Like Dog and Jeremy in Baltonam.

T
he light rail barrels downtown like a gigantic snake, rolling along tracks through the concrete jungle of 83 South. I imagine it swallowing every car on the highway, sucking each down its throat for all of eternity. The train cuts through the new office buildings and fancy underground parking garages of Centre City, pulling into the station outside of Camden Yards.

Dog sits on the floor at my feet, waiting until it’s time to move. She looks like the Sphinx. There’s no one on the train except for a man sleeping across several seats, snoring. I keep the aluminum bat in my hand. The train doors open to blackness. The baseball stadium is dark and empty.

Dad used to take me to Orioles games every weekend. We would ride the light rail downtown together. At Camden Yards, Dad would buy hot dogs and fountain sodas and bags of unsalted peanuts. We’d sit in the upper deck and watch the players who looked like spiders crawling over the dirt and grass. Jackson would insult the other team. Dad would watch us both cheer when the O’s would score a run. He’d high-five us. On our way home, we’d wait on the platform for the northbound light rail train and push our way to the front to get seats. Jackson and Dad would sit next to each other and I would lie across their laps, the speed of the train rocking me to sleep.

The moon crawls into the corner of the sky, pouring pale light over a parking lot full of cars. All of the surrounding office buildings are empty with only a few windows lit with light from a cleaning crew, working their way down a hallway.

Dog pulls me like a sled.

We reach the strip of land between the Inner Harbor and Fell’s Point, which reminds me of a war zone. Burned out buildings and abandoned cars abound. Empty parking lots, padlocked and wrapped in a barbed wire fence. Graffiti-laden yellow school buses. Broken glass glitters up from the uneven sidewalks and pot-holed pavement, reflecting street lamplights as they buzz—a broken rainbow. A breeze blows in off the harbor and smells of a fire. Redbrick sidewalks and cobblestone streets replace the cracked streets. I approach the empty police station across from Jackson’s apartment. Jimmy’s is empty. Rain drizzles down again, tapping over everything. A whip of fall wind blows in off the harbor and smells of an approaching storm, swirling in the distance.

A woman on the corner in a vinyl miniskirt tries to flag a taxi that doesn’t stop. She asks me if I can spare money for the bus.

“If you need money for a bus, how were you going to pay for a cab?” I ask.

“I would have found a way,” she says.

Ladies and Gentleman, this is Baltimore.

I
pound on Jackson’s door, but he doesn’t answer.

Dog sniffs the floor, searching for the source of that God-awful rank smell that hangs in the hallway. I pretend it is some kind of chemical warfare attack, that if I don’t gain access to the mother ship in T-minus 15 seconds it will melt my insides and make my eyes pop like water balloons. No one wants to be a Goo Baby.

“Fuck off,” Jackson says and throws something at the door. “I’m not home.”

“Jackson,” I say. “It’s me. Open up. We have to talk. It’s about Dad.” I bang a bunch more, this time using my bat like a battering ram, before something heavier hits the door. Glass shatters. Dog flinches and looks at me like a question,
What are you going to do
? I step back, ready to kick the door in like some kind of badass cop when Franny opens her door behind me.

“Jackson?” Franny asks, squinting under the hallway light.

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” I ask. “I didn’t mean to be so loud.”

“You didn’t wake me,” she says. “I was pretending more than anything.”

“I wish I was pretending,” I say, scratching Dog’s head.