The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

  “Does the TV work?” I asked, but it wasn’t going to work until 4 p.m. today, when the news came on. I ate my burger and gargled my beer, then ordered another one.

  “We don’t take city money here,” the bartender told me, but I put a piece of scrip on the table anyway.

  “Why don’t you fucking take it somewhere else then, eh Mickey Fuck?” I didn’t even have a quarter of a buzz on, but what the hell was he going to do? Beat the shit out of me, risk that I might crack my head open on one of the brass fixtures or on the concrete outside and come roaring back in five minutes later, cold and angry?

  “I said we don’t take it.” He stabbed the cash with a finger.

  “Well then why don’t you find someone who does take it, and then trade it for something you do take—maybe a dog for more burger meat. Wouldn’t you like to have a puppy of your very own?”

  “Now that would be the same as takin’ it, don’t you think?” he said, too angry for his own good. I took the drill case off the bar. I didn’t want him grabbing it as payment, or taking a chance on smashing my face in with it. He went on: “You’re just talking market exchanges now. I mean, I could take some euros or pesos as well and try to trade them on a bourse, do a little arbitrage maybe? For I’ve got nothing better to do than to take your city money and then spend the next day or three trying to find someone that takes it.”

  “The city takes it. Pay your power bill with it. The TV. How about garbage removal? It can be a new thing you try around here—having it carted away instead of frying it up and serving it.”

  “Billy,” the old woman said. Both the bartender and I turned to look at her. “Is your name Billy?” she said with a sneer.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Oh. Anyways,” she said, then she looked at the other Billy. “Put it on my tab. You two machos are giving me a sick headache. Anything to stop the yammering. You’re worse than my kids.” Then she turned in her stool and looked outside. Her shoulders heaved a bit. Billy frowned and began aggressively wiping down some glasses. He hadn’t even rinsed them. The other bar patron just pursed his lips and looked at me, then intently at a photo of a rugby team nailed in its frame to a pillar a few feet away. I wanted another beer and certainly had no problem about ordering one and, yes, yes, putting it on that woman’s tab thank-her-kindly, but then my phone rang and I froze.

  The reanimation of the dead is less a matter of science than it is a matter of Freytag’s Triangle. There just aren’t enough research institutions left in the United States to determine exactly which variables inform the time between the moment of death—as though death were often just a matter of a moment—and reanimation. Sometimes it takes hours, at other times it takes no more than a few seconds. This is why drillers are loathed; we almost never show up on time. Either one ends up sending splatters all over a perfectly nice living room while desecrating a corpse or one jumps out a window because one’s client starts growling, muscles start shifting, fingers flex, lips peel back and death itself rises, just as it did all those times on television. Dramatic irony rules the day; bad luck has washed over the nation like a wave and we’re all soaking in it.

  Relatively few people depend on drillers, but San Francisco is a large city—seven miles by seven miles, with a few 900-foot-high hills in the fucking middle of it. Families either wisely crush the skulls of their dying relatives on their own, or at least lock corpses behind heavy doors in windowless rooms and let their favorite uncle howl and beat himself to pieces against the walls. The dumb ones hope against hope that Grandma isn’t actually breathing her last, or that she might have some revenant affection or memory in her brain when she rises from her sickbed with a new posture. Then there are the homeless and the insane who wander the streets alone and need someone to take care of them. I didn’t know who my call was from, or whether the person on the other end of the line would even tell me the truth—did Joe die just now, or did it take his grieving wife an hour of sobs and shrieking to get it together enough to call 311 and ask for me. The bartender’s face melted with sympathy. I took the call. Fucking North Beach, and without even a quarter of a buzz on.

  I’m the sort of person who is normally very comfortable in a bar. It’s where I go to feel warm, a tiny world with all its citizens and subjects stretched out before me, and I’m Old King Log at rest. Even the Chieftain wasn’t so bad, not compared to my new job and the great unknown at the other end of Columbus Avenue. I’ve sat through other calls from work, text messages, deadlines, tremblors that made tumblers sing in their holders, fights, raids, you name it. Like my father in his cousin’s chrome diner back in Ohio, or timid librarians in their bubble-filled bathtubs, a bar to me is more than home. It’s an embrace I never want to leave. But I decided to go. Call it pulp fiction, or the imp of the perverse, or just plain ol’Todestrieb but I took my drill, hailed a pedicab, and headed over to the gig. My only thought in my head was that afterwards I’d like to pop into City Lights or get a drink at Vesuvio. The corpse I was to attend to wasn’t even dead to me, it was a gap, a blank.

  I was met at the entrance to a squashed old row house by an elderly man. Asian. Excellent posture, I noticed, which is unusual among the desperate.

  “Please,” he said, “she’s upstairs, in the apartment. I didn’t want you to ring the bell.”

  “Is she—” I stopped myself because it looked like he was about to cry, and I followed him up two flights of crooked steps to his apartment. It was not quite a hoard, but there were enough cardboard boxes and stacks of newspapers and even couches—two in the same room, inexplicably facing one another from opposite walls—to make for a tight squeeze through the apartment. The smell was of mold and cats, though I saw no animals or kitty litter or even toys. And of rotten beets; the umami-sweet smell of the recently deceased.

  “Why didn’t you want me to ring the bell?”

  He opened a door to a darkened room and reached inside to flip the switch. “It upsets her.”

  She was hanged. A small woman in a housedress with a floral print, her neck cracked and face purple. She growled when she saw me and her limbs activated. Clawed hands, nails long, reached for me. Her slim ankles fluttered and shuffled about. This was the closest I’d ever been to one. Then I saw the cats—three of them chewing on pieces of skin that had flaked off the woman. The ceiling was fairly high. Still, I didn’t think at all.

  “I know it’s too late,” the man said to me. “I just can’t bear to wait anymore. The kitties scratch at the door all day until I let them in. It’s hard, very hard.”

  “I’m a driller,” I said, more to myself than anyone else, though the corpse on the rope thrashed a bit. The disused fixture from which she had hanged herself creaked dangerously. “This isn’t something I can help with. Just nail the door shut and move. Take the cats or leave them. Get a shotgun and blow her head to pieces from here.”

  “She’s my wife!” His grip was suddenly strong on my right bicep. For a moment I had the terrible flash—he was going to push me inside, close the door and lock it. Then his woman would drop down from the ceiling. How many drillers has this man called? Is this how he feeds his wife and his cats? I dug my heels in instinctively and was ready to brain him with my drill case, but that might kill the old man, and then maybe I wouldn’t have time to destroy his brain, and what if the woman dropped from the noose anyway and scuttled toward me on her spider-limbs? That would be the end of me. How many other drill cases, other skulls and femurs were hidden in the mess of the apartment?

  “Oh, the kitties . . .” he said, sounding like a balloon slowly deflating. I asked for a broom. He asked why I wanted one and I realized I didn’t know. The childish instinct of poking at a carcass with a stick, I suppose, but I had to do something and I certainly wasn’t going to get on a chair and try to drill with her limbs still flailing. Then a tactic occurred to me and I didn’t care at all whether I lived or died. I ran to the middle of the room, scattering cats, and then grabbed the woman’s legs. I pulled
my knees up and left the ground. I wrapped my limbs around hers, clinging like a monkey. For a few seconds I swung and hoped that the rope was stronger than the rot in the sternocleidomastoid muscle, and—lo, verily!—it was. My ass slammed to the floor and her body followed, cold but fast. Her head hit separately, and bounced once, leaving a splat of grue that I accidentally put my hand in as I slid out from under her torso. Removal of the head works as well as destruction of the brain, just as it does with any vertebrate. I screamed like a pressure valve going off, then took a few breaths to calm myself. I was shaking, but not much more than usual.

  “Okay,” I said, but the man, on his knees now, didn’t answer. I wiped my hand on some old magazine, but the paper flaked off and stuck to my palm in clumps. “Well, okay,” I said again. He started weeping. “WHAT?” I finally demanded. “What did you expect to actually happen here? I blow some air up her cunt and she comes back to life? Slice open the cuts, find her heart, and put it in a store window mannequin? Jesus Christ, you make me sick.” There was something in my hair; it felt like when I was a child and my father would shout “Eat it or wear it!” and turn a bowl full of pasta with the wrong brand of sauce upside-down on top of me.

  Then the man was strong again. He snatched up my knapsack and flung it at me. Then he kicked the drill case in my direction. I dodged, fell to my knees. The case clattered against some furniture behind me.

  The man could only say “You! You!” I stumbled after the case and picked it up.

  Holding it in my hands, I realized something and said it aloud. “Goddamn, you know what? I didn’t even charge this thing. I’m such a stupid piece of shit.”

  “You…” But the rage was gone. He recovered my knapsack and handed it over, extending a single arm. I didn’t say thanks, but I took the bag and nodded. He followed me to the apartment door. On the borders of the rooms we passed, the cats scooted and shuffled, nudging over little piles of crap and treading on crinkly old papers on their way back to the lady of the house.

  I conspicuously—to myself anyway—went to City Lights first. I didn’t even really need a drink, I decided. Plus, perhaps I’d find something I wanted to read along with my drink. My drink, as in the one single drink I’d have at Vesuvio that I wasn’t even thinking about. Bookstores are almost as good as bars when it comes to me feeling comfortable there, except in bookstores it never lasts, and there’s almost never anything new. Every bookstore is a used bookstore these days. I didn’t have much money—I could buy an old New Directions paperback and even had The Colossus of Maroussi in my hands—but what if I spent too much in the store and then didn’t have quite enough for my drink? Nothing’s worse than a bar patron who just sits around waiting for someone he knows to show up from whom to mooch a drink…clearly I had Henry Miller on the brain. I put Colossus back and looked at the books I already owned on the shelves—some just cleaner versions of my own, others in new editions. Soon enough my eyes passed over the Ks in the Fiction section on the first floor where my books, which I’d not actually written anyway, absolutely weren’t. I nearly choked myself to death; I clenched my teeth that severely. Maybe some Muriel Sparks or, no, the magazines; the little ones especially—the fanzines and the hysteric broadsheets even City Lights knows to keep in a tight corner of the room. I found a Xeroxed bit of nonsense about Folger and the Oakland cemetery. It must be turning into some sort of thing. I bought it to look at in the bar. Damn, it was rye time.

  At City Lights I kept my drill case by my feet, but it didn’t matter. They knew me at the bar, or knew how to act how they did by giving me a wide berth. I’m sure they saw me come out of City Lights and step on over, and at the bar I drank and I drank and I wrote and I wrote. Just sentences and fragments. How to describe how that woman felt when she landed on me—a nylon stocking full of cold Jell-O? No, ridiculous. A bundle of soggy sticks? That’s a bit better. I underlined it. And the husband, I certainly shouldn’t call him “a little Chinese man”; he was as tall as I at any rate, and haven’t the words “little” and “Chinese” been placed together too often already? Scratch that out then. On furious nights like these, after a day of pummeling by the fists of indifference, the centimeter difference between an underline and a strike is the gap where God still lives, or so I hoped.

  We usually got a brown-out around 9 p.m. so I quickly wrote down on the margins of a page the things I had to look up when I got home: the name of the muscle on the side of the neck, who was really buried at Mountain View in Oakland, the official DSM definition of “hoarder.” Frank Norris, as it turns out, is buried there, as are a couple of the Folger coffee people just like the zine and the crazy said. During a not-very-lucid moment I turned to the bartender and told her a fantasy I’d just spun about getting a boat from a disused store along the Embarcadero, rowing to Oakland, finding the zombie Norris amidst the ruins, and asking him what to do. I could be a disciple, an apprentice, growling at the world at his side. The bartender said she didn’t know who Norris was but if he really died back in 1902 he certainly wouldn’t have reanimated, except maybe he’d be a pair of chattering teeth, like that old plastic wind-up novelty.

  “I tell you I don’t want your cursed opinion,” I told her and she guessed it was from one of Norris’s books as it didn’t sound at all like how someone would talk, and I’d just come from City Lights and spent all night writing until the lights started flickering. Then she had no more time for me. In the mirror I caught a glimpse of my hair, matted to my head from the various fluids of the reanimate from my first gig; my shirt was a slaughterhouse as well. Just as well the lights were very nearly out.

  With just a few other patrons and almost no ice at all and only a handful of words spoken between us, at Vesuvio I drank virtually alone all night in the dark.

  (3)

  I write in longhand when out and about because at home the solitude just gnaws at my stomach and I cannot think unless I drown it. Notes are preliminary, little more than individual sentences, full of arrows and cross-outs and little doodles of cubes and spirals. I do write at home, on my computer when electricity and Internet access allows. On screen is where I turn sentences into paragraphs, cut and paste to destroy the vestiges of workaday chronology that I’ve always found so tedious. I don’t have a computer printer—toner ink is one of those things nigh impossible to come by these days—and as revision is only ever abandoned rather than completed, I retype final drafts from the screen onto paper with my Olivetti M5 Premiere Plus, a portable manual typewriter. There is where the final polish takes place, in a medium where too many errors means a whole page retyped. Working the manual is like seeing the text again with new eyes. I love the thunky click of the keys, the tactility of it all. And when the power goes out, it doesn’t matter. While everyone ran to office supply stores to stock up on cartridges and USB drives and cheap photocopiers in the days after the reanimations, I quietly cornered the local market on carbon paper and typewriter ribbon. I’m playing a long-term game here.

  I am running out of printouts of my one published fiction, however. I’ll have to hit the library again and run off some more on the one day a month when it’s open. Before the outbreak, I had the URL for “1/19” in my email sig, and would often leave it up on the screen when I had guests over so that it might be nonchalantly discovered. It’s both easier and harder to publish now; easier in that since most everyone is dead there are no more Joyce Carol Oateses and Stephen Kings filling up the shelves. On the other hand, most everyone is dead, including the agents and editors and bookstore employees. So publishing is back to where it was at the dawn of the nineteenth century—mostly UK and Commonwealth imports, and often semi-legal at that, or wrapped up along with blankets and emergency high-protein food powder. Domestic publications are small fanzines, regional presses run from a basement, some online stuff but that comes and goes with the power grid on a near-daily basis, and the occasional touring company of poets and actors, though such tours never get very far. Infinite is still up somehow, though i
t’s long since a ghost site, like most websites and social networks are.

  In a way, I expected this. I got my Olivetti back as a college freshman in 1999. Ten of them actually, from a compact man named Bram Tolbert of the shiny blue suit and happy patter. He stood behind the folding card table and in front of a small white truck of the sort that items frequently fell from so to be resold at deep discounts. That sort of thing was a major economic driver in Youngstown in those days.

  Tolbert was going with the carnival barker schtick: “Are you a writer? Are you interested in the end of the world? Come see what you need to survive the apocalypse! Smart college kids are gonna need what I got when the end comes, especially you fancy writer types!”

  It was as though his slogans were written just for me, so I had to see what he was selling. I stepped up to the table and Tolbert, with a huge smile of oversized synthetic-looking teeth, lifted a plastic case onto the table and asked me what I thought was inside.

  “Is it a gun?” I asked. “Is helter-skelter going down one day soon?” I needed to make it clear that I wasn’t taking him seriously, not even as a kook, for the simple reason that ultimately I’m pretty credulous. I’ll sign up for any stupid thing just to have the experience of experiences. Life is material, but there’s not much living to be had in Youngstown except for television and books and alcohol. So he popped open the case and showed me the typewriter. I laughed hard.

  “You laugh now,” Tolbert said, practically shouting that last word. Then, conversationally: “What are your New Year’s plans?” It was April, right after Spring Break. I’d not gone to Florida or anything like that, but spent my time mixing cement and carting bricks for a local contractor.

  “How the hell would I know?” I asked back, already agitated.

  He said, “I’ll tell you what you’ll be doing. You won’t be out having a party. You won’t be drinking champagne and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne,’” he said. “You won’t be playing with your Christmas toys, but you might be wearing your Christmas sweater. Every one you ever received. Every one that still fits.” His anaphora was a well-practiced chant, with pantomime gestures for partying—index fingers twirling in the air—drinking—the obvious glug glug maneuver—and sweater-wearing—this last invoking the pull of a sweater over one’s head with raised arms and a shake of the shoulders.