The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

  “We didn’t want to call too late,” the man, who introduced himself as Jack, explained. “Don’t worry though; it’s nothing contagious.”

  “I’m not worried . . . may I use your bathroom?” I was pointed to it and sat down on the toilet and opened up my flask and emptied it in three hungry gulps. I was going for overload, the boozy equivalent of an ice cream headache, but I didn’t have enough for anything other than a dull throb. I stayed in the bathroom for a while—there was a window, and the design was all flowery in oranges and brighter pinks. Mother’s room, surely, despite the two males in the house. She must have been in here seconds after either one of them came in to use the commode. Nothing worth consuming in the medicine cabinet; I could have gone for a few homebrew Percocets. I did my ears with Q-Tips, real ones thank God, with a firm cardboard stem. There was a knock on the door and a feminine voice asking me if I was all right.

  “Be right out,” I said. I was crying and didn’t even realize it, and she burst into tears when she saw me. That’s how I learned her name was Marina, when Jack told her not to cry because Tyler might hear her and get upset. She went to his room to wait, saying she’d call us, “when he was ready.” Then it was just me and Jack in the kitchen. We sat across from one another and after a minute or two, Jack went to the cabinet under the sink and came out with some of the okay stuff—Lagavulin, sixteen year. Without a word he poured us each a drink, not in tumblers but in plastic cups, the sort which Marina probably bought for some planned picnic or kiddie birthday party.

  The booze warmed my tongue, and helped level me out from my blast of Teacher’s. I remembered something from school—new hires at newspapers were almost always broken in by being sent out to write local obituaries. People want to talk; that’s the lesson a cub reporter was supposed to learn in the first few days of the job. So I started.

  “Good kid, I’m sure.”

  “Pfft,” Jack said. “How would you know?” His voice was steady. It wasn’t the whisky talking.

  I had to tread lightly, especially if I wanted a refill. “I could tell from his room. Maps of the solar system on the walls, the drawings looked pretty good for a kid. Very detailed, actually.” And not of grayish, hunched-over stick figures soaked in red Crayola kind, either.

  “He’s a retard,” Jack said. “Autistic. His favorite hobby was the Goddamned history of the ferry schedule. Number two—the moons of the solar system. Jupiter’s moons, especially. Sixty-three moons.”

  “That’s a lot.” Lagavulin makes me stupid sometimes.

  “He loved to chant their names; he memorized when they were discovered and by whom. He liked Thebe—it’s shaped like a deformed doughnut because of a large crater. Ellipsoidal, that was Tyler’s favorite word. Thebe was discovered during the Voyager I flyby in 1979. Did you know that, sir?”

  “No. Well, I don’t think I did. I liked space too when I was a kid, but that was before my time. I remember when the first shuttle exploded, though. I cried all day.”

  “Me too,” Jack said. “Me too.” He looked up at the ceiling—it was tin, and painted bronze. The nicest and most interesting ceiling in the world. “So, what did you do . . . before?”

  “I was a writer. Still am, after a fashion.” This was going all wrong. I tried something. “Were you a lawyer?”

  “Still am, after a fashion,” he said. Not a bad guess, given how easily he took control of the conversation. “I work for the city now. Foreign affairs, trade agreements. We’ll be trading again soon, almost like a city-state might. Like Hong Kong or Singapore.”

  “Sure, why not? We have a good port. We could sell . . . uh . . .”

  “Bodies.”

  “Bodies.”

  “Reanimates. Not live ones.” He nodded toward my drill case. “All the world powers want to know what makes a body move. Basic research, you know. Medical applications.”

  “Military applications too, you think?”

  Then Jack roared with laughter. He was so loud that Marina came from her vigil with long gazelle strides and demanded to know what was going on. Her face was flush; Jack’s too. She slapped him hard across the face, and that shut him up for a second, but he recovered and hissed that they had a guest.

  “Would it be better if I waited outside?” I asked. My hope was that the pair would hug one another and burst into tears, and through their racking sobs say that yes yes that would be a good idea, and they wouldn’t show me to the door so I could take the bottle with me for company while they waited with their son. Maybe he would last the night. I could leave at dusk and even cite curfew. I was a scofflaw, like nearly everyone, but a lawyer and wife—hell, she was probably a lawyer too; that was probably how they’d met, in law school—would have to accept that excuse. And when they called 311 one next, someone else could come out for this shitheap of misery.

  “Don’t bother. Tyler’s ready,” she said. I wanted so badly to finish my drink, but with her eyes on me, little gray stones, I knew that I couldn’t. I wobbled down the hall to Tyler’s little room. He was still, but not any more still than he had been an hour before. Marina followed me into the room and stood by the door, her arms folded across her chest.

  “Ma’am, I don’t think—”

  “I’m not leaving,” she said. “I want to see this, I need to witness it. You don’t understand. I know you’ve been doing this for a long time, that you’re a professional—”

  “A professional,” I repeated. She was on auto-pilot now, not even knowing what the hell was coming out of that flappy jaw. Pre-school teachers who didn’t understand precious Tyler and his moon-crazed ways were professionals, too; so were the doctors that didn’t just kill him with a morphine drip when they had their hands on him were professionals, definitely. I was just another plumber or house painter. Not a Mexican anyway, so I got to be a professional.

  “I’d like to turn him over. It would be . . . better that way. For the equipment,” I said. “I appreciate the lengths you’ve gone to here, but . . .”

  “Do it where he lies,” she said to me finally.

  Were I sober, I would have left. They say that booze and money don’t change character so much as they reveal it, but I never felt that way. Drunken ego is something else, a shambling mess of desires, pride, and ultimately lickspittle cowardice. She had her arms folded over her chest. Were they at her sides, I would have left. When a woman is firm with me, I just collapse into a puddle. I took out my drill and put it to the mark on Tyler’s forehead. Then Jack rushed me like a wind from around a corner and I was on the floor.

  “He’s not dead!” Jack shouted. His fist was the size of his face. I heard the drill whine somewhere in the room, Marina shrieked. Jack was straddling my chest and dropping his fist onto my head, but I was loose and it just felt distant, like someone kicking the back of a chair at the movies. I bucked him off and stumbled to my feet. The kid’s face was ruined, his nose and cheeks chewed up, but the brain was probably intact. Marina and Jack were grappling on the floor somehow. My head throbbed: I was having some trouble breathing, but I didn’t think my nose was broken. It was just the blood and the tarp; the smell made my lungs revolt. Tyler was head down, half off the bed. I drilled my hole. His parents shrieked like animals in a fire.

  Most people don’t stay drillers for very long, which is why there is such a high demand for us. It’s also why we’re barely trained and paid so little—tons of turnover, so no need for the city to invest heavily in “professionalizing” the gig. I’d done two drills in as many days. According to my online account, I was already in the top quartile of drillers. Most people, as it turns out, end up throwing their drill into the Bay after their first appointment. Except for the workers who stake out the hospital emergency rooms, nobody ever gets the sort of circumstance we’re supposed to—a dead person not yet reanimated, quietly being debrained by a drill. It’s all bad craziness, teeth being bared and eyes flying open at the last moment, or poor relations not quite dead, or people who just want you to k
ill them because they’re lonely . . . or even horny. You had to be stone cold to be a driller, and anyone that hard could find a better living as a criminal or in the upper echelons of city government. You know, Jack’s bosses.

  There aren’t any driller bars, not in the Mission or the Tenderloin or the Lower Haight or Chinatown, or anywhere I felt like going. Is this how cops used to feel when they’d enter non-cop bars? But the money was good and deep down in my sober ego I had to admit I loved it. I never bought into the Hemingway myth—run with the bulls, sign up for the Spanish Civil War, box stringy Cubans, then write novels about impotency—but I was in the middle of it now. It wasn’t the drunk ego fueling my interest in the drilling gig either. Drunken me wanted to curl up and stay warm and cozy in a bar, leave the drill at home, and wait till the world collapsed enough that nobody bothered keeping track of tabs or favors anymore. It was sober ego, that other me with whom I was hardly familiar after years of estrangement, that craved the drill. The sober ego raked the leaves and shoveled snow, set up email accounts for his hairspray-addled cousins, went to school and got on the Dean’s List, kept his shitbox car together back when he had one—drunk ego had wrapped it around a tree in Berkeley and had his license taken away—and didn’t worry even for a second that he couldn’t really tell the difference between someone dead, someone near death, and a body in the throes of reanimation. Sober me was helping the world somehow, keeping back the waves of death reborn one cranium at a time. It was drunk me who couldn’t take it. Neither the sober nor the drunk ego could deal with the easy way out—sitting in the ER, playing doctor with the rest of them.

  I started taking what promised to be the risky gigs. The reports of the dying homeless on street corners. When they get up and wander off when I’m still half a block away, are they reanimated or simply recovering from a boozy stupor? More old people in cramped apartments, some of them so frail and wilted there seems to hardly be any blood in their heads—their skulls crumble under the drill. And there are plenty of people who just call to have someone to talk to. Like I said, communities disintegrated in the face of the rampaging dead. Families collapsed in hours. It’s the social misfits who were ultimately the fittest, the ones who needed nothing more than a bit of food and a moldy roof overhead. If the Big One ever hit, we’d all be dead under the rubble, without anyone to even know we were missing. But something else hit, and we talk. I keep my foolscap in my bag and take notes and I hear stories.

  “I was at work when it happened,” one man told me. His name was William. I introduce myself as Billy, but he didn’t make any comment about the similarity. William is gay, and alone. One of those slightly chubby gays who probably wouldn’t be alone if he didn’t insist that he should be. He looked like a less lumpy Hemingway, or Fred Exley right after A Fan’s Notes made him famous enough to have a beard.

  “At first I thought it was a hoax—we all did, after all. All those zombie marches in town and movies; it seemed like a publicity stunt. I was just working for a start-up, database stuff, nothing fancy, so it wasn’t as though I was surrounded by bodies emerging from the grave or sitting up on a slab. Oh dear, I can’t imagine how it must have been like to work in a hospital on that day…” He drank his tea, then snorted at himself. “I sound exactly like everyone else. But what am I supposed to say? I wish zombies didn’t rot so I could find a nice hunky dead boy to do chores around the house? Chores like me?” He laughed. “Oh, I’m so glad my mother’s dead. Dead for over a decade, that is. I don’t need an unexpected visit from Florida, that’s for sure.”

  I laughed and wrote and William referred to me as his Boswell. He loved holding forth on the city before and after: “There were two befores and afters, truly: the dot.bomb was the first—the zombies came later”; on the best brunch item one should serve a lover after the third weekend sleepover on spring Sunday mornings: “Eggs Blackstone”; and his own little conspiracy theory about the rise of the dead, which unlike the theories of almost every other gay man in San Francisco, involved neither the federal government nor AIDS: “The universe is a teleological phenomenon. There is something that is good that the world must become. We’d hidden away death for too long, painted it up like a working woman.”

  “Working woman?”

  He laughed. “That’s what we used to call street whores in the 1990s. It was a solidarity thing. Identity politics. It was all crazy—where was I?”

  “We painted death like whores.”

  “We painted death like whores!” William roared. “I like that. We, as a species, have always been close to death. In parts of Greece, the families of the dead disinter the bodies of their loved ones and wash the bones every few years. Ah, but look who I’m talking to.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, it’s so. And of course until the last hundred and fifty years ago or so, anyone who wanted to have a chicken dinner decapitated, plucked, gutted, and butchered their own chicken. Isn’t it odd that vegetarianism and veganism came into widespread vogue only after animal death became an industrial practice, a bit of mass culture handled by an underclass and by soulless machines?”

  “That is odd. Well-said.” One had to prime the pump a bit occasionally with folks like William. “I never noticed that at all before. What an interesting and trenchant observation.”

  “Humanity was on the verge of something naked and profound—ever hear of the Singularity?”

  “Let’s say I haven’t. But it’s when computers become smarter than people or something.”

  “Or something,” William said. His voice grew colder and lower. “The human brain would no longer be the brake or drag on technological progress. An ‘intelligence explosion.’ primarily artificial in nature, would lead to a post-human reality where people like you and I,” he said, and he put a hand on my wrist, “as bright as we are, might have no place. The post-human experience would be as inexplicable to us as tweeting, ‘Catching the 38L to see Wild Strawberries at the Kabuki’ to our thirty-eight followers or whomever would be to a bonobo.”

  “So, the dead . . . ?”

  “So the dead arose, recent history itself cleared its throat, to stop the species from taking the wrong path. I don’t know if I believe in an anthropocentric universe, but I do believe that somewhere, somehow, humanity knew of its own potential fate and something happened to make sure it was forestalled.” Then, on a dime: “So, how about you? Got any dark secrets?” William leaned in conspiratorially. “I have to say, my own theory would probably go over a bit better in Berkeley, but I didn’t want to haul ass all the way out there when people were alive!”

  I didn’t really have a theory as regards the reanimation of the dead. None of the usual theories sounded all that feasible, but of course the most intelligent and socially minded individuals were the first to go. A foreign attack, maybe, like the neutron bombs that wipe out the people while leaving the buildings intact? Except that tons of buildings weren’t intact anymore. Postcolonial voudon—has America finally paid for its role in oppressing Haiti? That’s another pretty big theory, but it only has currency locally among liberal weirdos. There are other versions of the same, with American slaves or dead Indians implicated. Maybe some sort of catastrophic and cyclical natural phenomenon that last happened in prehistory? A dead zombie looks a hell of a lot like a dead person when nothing is left but bone and pottery shards.

  William looked at me hungrily, as though he had well-practiced answers for all the usual crap people spout. His own personal vintage of crap—fermented in a tiny Western Addition apartment for the last couple of years, while William sat alone and traded in foreign currencies when the Internet was up, and brought home boys to make Eggs Blackstone and talk about the intrinsic finality of our species-being—would surely be proof against anything I might say.

  “I agree with you. I mean, even practically, it makes sense, right? Perhaps there’s another alternative reality where the Singularity did take place, and some bonobos, wanting
the opposite numbers in other universes to keep us from making their mistakes—or even challenging them one day—raised the dead to keep us in check.”

  William stared at me for a long moment. “So, you agree with me?”

  “Yes.”

  “About the Singularity, the telos of the universe, the physico-theological proof of a cosmic divinity . . . ?”

  “Yeah, it makes perfect sense.”

  “But your version of it just happens to sound like the plot of Plan 9 from Outer Space?” He stood up and scratched that salt-and-pepper beard. “Or like a big-budget remake, in fact.”

  “Well, I was just trying to ground it a bit,” I said. I didn’t give two shits about my theory which I’d pulled from my ass—a place William should have liked!—just to please him and keep the conversation going, but now I was ready to die to defend it. “It’s like Kant said, ‘If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on’.”

  “Kant!” I for the first time noticed just how large William’s hands were as he’d made them into fists and held them up to his chest, ready to box Kant for three bloody and lopsided rounds. “Kant was very much against what I’m saying. With what you,” and he sneered these last few words, the way a drunk does when it’s time to throw down, “agree with.”

  I stood up. I had my drill case. I could brain him with it in a second if I had to, and I had the drill to to finish him. I was on a call; my location had been recorded. Not a jury in the city would convict me.

  “Faggot,” I said. “You fat old fucking queen.”