The Last Weekend

by Nick Mamatas

  “Get the fuck out of here,” William said, his voice soft and reasonable again. My dreary old Midwestern insult was a shot to the liver. Both his and mine. He sounded just like deep-voiced Aija when he said, “Get the fuck out of here” and it made me desirous of a surreptitious kiss that tasted of ash.

  Then there was Alexa. She’d called for a driller early one afternoon and I answered. A colt, like Yvette back in school, and Greek too; American, but Greek. Greek enough to ask me:

  “So, what did your father come to this country with?” She didn’t seem agitated at all, or eager to usher me toward a dead husband or dying child so I settled in for an afternoon that might actually lead somewhere. A little retsina maybe, and a nooner with a friendly stranger with the kind of body I liked—tight ass, little tennis ball breasts, and limbs that looked like they would break under me, but which first embrace would reveal to be rebar wrapped in silk.

  We talked for a bit, in the hallway of her apartment—she had one of those L-shaped numbers with a kitchenette and one other room off the side. The financial district was full of them now that there was little commercial finance going on. Her father had come with a cardboard briefcase, two bottles of Metaxa, fifty dollars, and a change of clothes. She grew up in Brookline, MA, and smiled when I said I went to school in Boston for a year, then frowned when I said “Emerson.” Then Alexa laughed again when I told her that I went there to study creative writing. “Too bad there’s nothing to write about anymore, eh?” I could have told her about the girl she reminded me of, from back in Boston, but that would have made me seem even more pathetic, I’m sure.

  “Well, I did drop out and move here to drink myself to death, so I guess it was kismet.” And with that she finally let me in and went to her kitchenette to pour us a couple of screwdrivers, albeit weak ones. “The patient is in the bedroom,” she told me. She was wearing stripey socks, no shoes. “In here.” In her bedroom, which was the sort of Ikea spartan one used to see all the time before barricading doors in a hurry became au courant, was a small aquarium and in it three fish and a body of a fourth, floating. A little black and yellow stripey number. I turned to look at Alexa, and her top was already off, and a black bra—not lace, that would be too trashy, but with a shine—was waiting for me. Her belly was white, a bit like a fish’s itself.

  “Please don’t make a joke about drilling,” she said. She held out her arms, almost in the manner of a child wanting to be carried. I stepped forward and walked her right onto the bed. There’s always a moment in a book when I cringe—it’s just at these moments when a writer recounting or contriving a scene has a choice. Did Alexa and I actually make love or is the event of physical coupling better handled by the Anglo-Saxon bark of fuck? Should the male gaze take it all in—Alexa’s stubbly cunt, her thick nipples too large for her small breasts, the ribs visible like wings? Or should we just move to afterwards when she shows me the gun—some 9mm of the sort cops generally have—and tells me that she salvaged the apartment the hard way.

  “I’m a really good shot. My father was into guns. From Crete, you know, where they still have blood feuds. He was like a Greek Republican hillbilly redneck. I moved here just in time for the reanimation—I was supposed to have a roomie and live up in the Oakland Hills.”

  “East Bay, ugh,” I said. That joke was one of the few that was always still funny. Alexa had a piggy, snortful laugh. I made a vow at that moment to be one of those serious-minded men who were kind to animals and who dourly read the news about the rest of the country while muttering What a waste, what a waste under his breath. I hoped Alexa didn’t like cut-ups.

  “Yeah. Anyway,” she said, “I just thought you should know. You must have seen a few reanimates up close. Don’t you just want to destroy them when you see them? I have no idea why anyone would try to keep their relatives ‘safe’ by locking them away, and plead with them as if a personality or a soul were somewhere in there. It’s something deep, Billy, deep in me. Like my ovaries are demanding I assert some generative impulse by wiping out the dead. It’s just that sense of the uncanny, you know, that makes me want to strike out.” She put her tongue to the barrel of the gun, then turned on her side and rested the end of the gun barrel on my chest.

  “Please don’t shoot my nipple off.”

  “Are you getting hard again?”

  “Uh, I was.”

  “I want to go on patrol with you.” She held the gun up, pointing it to the ceiling, and kissed where it had lay on me. “I bet we’d make a great team. You must have come too late to certain calls and had to deal with a reanimate. More than one, probably, and more than once.”

  I laughed. “Mostly, people just call for company or to, you know…for relatives who may not actually be dead. I mean, I’m not a doctor or anything.”

  “Do you fuck a lot of girls this way, Vasilis?”

  “Define a lot.”

  “When was your last before me?”

  Sober ego took over—lie! Alcohol is truth; it takes a sober mind to lie effectively, to chart the minds of the people one must lie to. Drunk ego wanted Alexa; sober me knew a woman with a gun was always trouble. So I told her two days before. Another woman, absolutely. In Pacific Heights. Slightly older, but well-preserved. Did she have big tits, Alexa wanted to know. Yes; a sizeable rack.

  “I could have rested my gimlet on it. She had a dry bar in one corner of her apartment. It was a real ring-a-ding-dinger of a place. Like something out of an old men’s magazine.” Alexa stopped smiling. “She was a good cocksucker too—the way I like it. Mouth only, her wrists in my hands.”

  Alexa knew I was lying now, which was part of the lie, of course. She was wild enough to want to be titillated by the idea of a wandering driller sexing women left and right while zombies march down the streets below, unmolested and free to breed in their own peculiar way. She wasn’t wild enough to be treated like one of the guys in a locker room somewhere, not while we were cuddling in a pool of our own sweat.

  “I think,” you should leave. But no. Alexa said, “I think you should help me break into City Hall.”

  (5)

  When women ask me for something, I have a tendency to obey without hesitation, unless it involves the bedroom.

  I’m enthusiastic, but not generous as far as love-making goes, I admit it. The first woman to tell me this was Yvette, who was also the first woman to phrase her requests with “I think you should…” instead of in the form of a question. It’s a jejune thing to notice, but in Youngstown in the early 2000s such forwardness was rare. If Youngstowners were ever a scrappy bunch of proletarians who made the country great, it only took a generation or so after the mills shut down to turn everyone into giant blobs of high-fructose corn syrup, fueled by inchoate rage. The 1950s era reasserted itself—girls got pregnant early and married quickly, everyone ate TV dinners and gratefully consumed plastics, and men ruled the town for no other reason than they had greater upper body strength and more enthusiasm for shouting.

  Yvette was different. She was going to get her degree and then leave town to become a Big Deal somewhere on the East Coast. When I met her in college in the same town she grew up in, she was starting to break away. Like every other dumb first-year, she was going to college while dating her high school boyfriend. But she dumped her Craig when he joined the army, to the open-mouthed disgust of her high school girlfriends. She was a whore after that, a slut. Practically a member of al-Qaeda itself, and a stuck-up bitch, too.

  When she finally hooked up with me, it was on her own initiative. The typewriters were long gone, but I still saw Tolbert occasionally; he was selling some semi-dubious local Internet service now, for $9.99 a month, and hoping to be bought out by AOL, “Or one of the other big boys,” he said. “It’s all about the flip. No need to build a business anymore; nothing will ever be long-term again. Today, a business or even a sales line is like a suit. You wear it till it falls out of fashion in a year or three.”

  Yvette told him, in that very same parki
ng lot where I’d sold typewriters more than a year earlier, “Well then, no reason to pay attention to this, what is it, lifetime warranty on this CD-ROM you want me to buy?”

  Tolbert gave her that little six-gun point—index finger forward, thumb up. “Sharp!” Then he turned to me. “She’s a keeper, so keep her.” I wasn’t even with Yvette, though with her triple-digit IQ, her newly single status, and the denim miniskirt she had worn to class that day, I was amenable to the suggestion.

  “I think we should go now,” she said, and walked off without waiting. I gave Tolbert a shrug and trotted after her.

  “Sorry,” I told her, when we were halfway across the parking lot. “He always has some scheme.”

  “He’s a good judge of the human condition, I think,” Yvette said. “He has me all sorted.” Yvette tended toward Britishisms, though she had the same accent as any other local. Even her stories were often about the neighbours, and involved people wandering through museums and remarking on the colours of this or that famous piece of modern art that somehow perfectly captured the emotions of the characters. Then they realized that they weren’t happy, but indeed, neither was anyone else except perhaps the long-dead painter of the art that so loomed before them.

  “Sorted how?”

  “He’s right. I think we should date,” Yvette said. “Let’s date.”

  “Well, all right.” And my fascination with wiry young women, blunt ones who just blurt out what they want without prevarication or even subtlety, was born. Our dates mostly comprised of enthusiastic fucking—we were like a pair of loggers operating one of those long saws on the first day of work. And like that, it got less fun as time went on.

  Yvette lived in the dorm though she was as local as I—I’d went to Rayen High School but she had attended Cardinal Mooney, but had managed to convince her folks to spring for room and board to “complete the college experience.” Like any Catholic school girl, she instantly became a wild cocksucking pagan who stood naked before Wotan two nights a week and thought the new moon was sufficient cause for a holiday. Yvette’s clothes reeked of patchouli, but at least she had a stylish wedge haircut instead of the common long hippie ’do that said, “I have the same haircut now that I did in the third grade” that most of her cohort wore. And she shaved her legs and armpits, thank God and all the saints that mama lit candles to in our kitchen ikonostasis.

  “I think you should date other people,” she said three delirious weeks later. We were in bed. I’d been watching the clock so I could get home by midnight. I needed a mattress I could stretch out in, and Yvette’s YSU-issue twin bed wouldn’t do it. Generally, I bent her over with my own feet on the floor, or she played cowgirl. The clock turned over: 11:11. Make a wish. Here’s the thing about Yvette—she was a psychology major and prone to provocations. She loved to taunt and tease. But gin and bile filled my mouth anyway.

  “What? What do you mean—are you breaking up with me?”

  “I think you need more women. Don’t you think you’d benefit from living a little, seeing other women?”

  “And come back to you later?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Christ, Yvette,” I said. “Then what necessarily?”

  She smiled for a moment—Yvette had an upper lip that turned up when she did, and I loved seeing it so close. I wanted to kiss her hard and make her swallow what she had just said.

  But she turned away from me and said, “I fucked nine guys this month.” I raised my fist. I didn’t think I was the kind of guy to hit a woman, but in that moment I was. The moment passed. “Ever hear of polyamory? That’s what we should do. I mean, we never agreed to be exclusive or anything. I don’t even believe in monogamy. It’s oppressive.”

  Anger left me and was replaced with an intense desire to kick open the door of some other room in the hall and empty my balls into the first girl I found. If she could fuck around, I could fuck around. I was hard again, and Yvette gripped me, rolled over onto her belly and did my favorite trick. She talked with her mouth full. Through slurping and murmuring—and she’d swirl her tongue around my head when I guessed right—she told me that we were animals, meant to fuck all the time. That we’d be better fucks if we both fucked a lot. That I’d be her something. Her what? Something. Finally, I took a fist full of her hair and pulled her off me. A line of drool stretched from my hog of a member to her lower lip.

  “My primary,” she said in a snarl. “My ‘main man,’ like the hippies used to say. We could come back here, compare notes. I’d even help you pick up other girls. We could be total sluts together—try everything, try everyone. But we’d be committed to one another.”

  Yvette needed a slapping. Hell, she needed to be back home with her parents. Back to those Catholics and their terror of what’s between a young girl’s legs. “Where the hell did you even hear of this crap…Oh, let me guess. That ‘pagan’ guy, right? What’s that asshole’s name? Stag?”

  “Yes, it was Stag’s idea. He lent me books. The Ethical Slut. There are websites too. Do you want to see?”

  “No, I want to wash my cock off and go home.”

  “You leaving mad makes me horny,” she said. A hand slipped under the sheets. “Come back at 3 a.m. At one minute after, I’ll be asleep and you can spend the night outside or drive on back to your parents’.”

  I grabbed my clothes off the floor as we chatted about pleasantries. With Yvette, one had to develop that skill. One second she was talking about the forty-year-old man who ran the school’s Dungeons and Dragons club and convinced her that she should suck every cock she meets; the next it was on to whether or not I’d ever seen Twin Peaks. Had I read “Araby” yet?

  With one leg in my pants I said, “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” Then, “No, I haven’t read it yet.” I found the other pant hole in the dark and pushed my naked leg in. “I’m not coming back.”

  “I hope you do.”

  I was home in ten minutes, leadfooted all the way. The TV was on in my parents’ room—infomercials already, but the murmur of Chuck Norris was hard to make out over the rumbling of snores and occulted Greek mutterings. We were a family of terrified sleepers; something was always roiling under the surface. I only found out that it was unusual to have two or three nightmares a week because of my creative writing class, where my stories were critiqued for the inevitable dream sequences that ended in a twist and shout. So much blood, so much blood…that’s how my last nightmare had ended. I risked a quick shower, then went to my own room and stood with my finger on the light switch for two minutes. Then I sat down to write.

  If there’s a story more tedious than the dorm-room affair short story, I’ve yet to encounter it. Then again, I knew nothing but the raw and bleeding scab of my whole life; Yvette didn’t just go for the heart—it felt like she had dug her nails into the flesh of my forehead and yanked the skin off down to my toes. I was exposed, nerves on fire, viscera knotted. And I poured out a story that, oh no, wasn’t about her and wasn’t about me. Bob and Elaine. Of course not! And in my story, it was the guy who had heard about polyamory and experimented with it by arranging for all his friends to come by and pull a train on his “newly wedded wife, with the raven hair in a thick thatch between her legs and ice-blue eyes.” So different—if I had to describe Yvette’s real hair, I would have said “the underside of a nuthatch” or something, and I liked that turn of phrase so much that I took it as a title. “The Underside of a Nuthatch.” Maybe some of the students would think I was making a reference to insanity. Fodder for future critics and bibliographers, oh yes. I didn’t even spellcheck it. I printed it out—all eight pages—and saw that it was a quarter to three. I found a bottle of retsina downstairs and took it with me, for Yvette if I made it back on time, for warmth if I didn’t. Any other girl, the 3 a.m. deadline would have been a bluff, but with her I knew it was serious. But her little icicle of a body next to mine or a night in t
he car would both be fine with me.

  I waited outside Yvette’s dorm all night, snoozing in my car and occasionally waking up—as always, with a start and often with some kind of yelp from the hands narrative ideas around my throat, the fissure ripping open the city—to add a few words in the margins of my story. In the car, it was as though everyone were dead, and only the buildings and automatic systems remained. Yvette liked to run in the mornings before her 8:30 class—she was a go-getter that way. The sun rose slowly, if inexorably. I sunk under the dash of my car with the bottle to try to get a few more winks of sleep, but before long it was too sunny. I’d have to move soon, as I’d parked on the grass in a little traffic island. I revved the engine just as Yvette happened to come out of the dorm in her running shorts, and she turned to me, then jogged off, taking a path through the greenery I couldn’t follow in the car. The retsina bottle was empty.

  Our writing workshop wasn’t Iowa-style—we didn’t get stories to bring home and read and mark up between sessions. The teacher read the stories aloud in a strangely affectless voice; shades of Stephen Hawking. We couldn’t take notes, but instead just had to respond to what we were most viscerally affected by. So I had a story, and it was more or less a moment-by-moment re-enactment of the night before, and it was an absolute piece of shit. I handed it to the teacher, whom I don’t think had ever even managed to publish anything other than a poem or three in some saddle-stitched journals (and this, before the apocalypse that made saddle-stitched zines the center of the literary universe), and he decided to read it first. I laughed the entire way through it. The Ethical Slut, hahahaha, and 11:11 was hilarious too, a big belly laugh. And the ending was a real laugh riot—none of the usual undergrad histrionics or stapled-on epiphanies. I just ended it mid-sentence, so it looped around back to the first paragraph, which started mid-sentence.

  “It’s a haiku of sorts!” I announced, though talking while one’s story was being considered was against the rules of the class. “Please read it aloud again. Haikus are recited twice. That’s also why the story loops back around.” The professor frowned at me. I smiled over at him and with my hands shooed him on a bit. He knew I’d just bark and bellow more, it would be a festival of enthusiastic and ridiculous demands. So he read the story again and I whooped it up at all the killer lines, nudged my seatmate with my elbow, and occasionally glanced over at Yvette. Her face wasn’t red, her eyes not watery, but she did seem very interested in a stray molecule off to her left and on the floor. Her neck tilted oddly, as if she were broken.