The Making of Zombie Wars

by Aleksandar Hemon

  Another round of drinks; more talk; more images on the TV of our troops in Baghdad; the euphoric broadcasters; Paco dipping beer mugs in a foam cloud in the sink; the jukebox playing a plaintive song; the couple stumbling over to fuck in the bathroom stalls; everything as it should be, because it could not be otherwise. Reality and perfection are definitely the same fucking thing.

  Another round and Bega and Josh were arguing over what might qualify one for the title of a survivor. Bega adamantly denied it to Josh, unconditionally claiming it for himself. Joshua was by now too drunk to win the argument, even if he descended from an estimable dynasty of survivors, and was presently in the midst of surviving the acid in his glass.

  On the positive side, the two men were equal in their inebriation, which led to a unanimous consensus: they were drunk like foxes. “Fuck it!” they chin-chinningly proclaimed. “Fuck the fucking future!”

  INT. NORIKO’S BATHROOM — NIGHT

  Captain Enrique takes off his Marine uniform, exposing his tattooed biceps and chest. Noriko invites him to join her in the shower. He does, followed closely by Linda. The three of them have intense sex, Captain Enrique’s dog tags steadily rattling.

  Suddenly, a zombie rips the curtain off the rod and bites into the man, who has a map of Mexico on his chest, taking out a chunk of his shoulder. As Noriko and Linda scream in horror, Captain Enrique grabs the showerhead and pummels the unrelenting zombie. Fighting for his life, he tears off the zombie’s ear, then an arm. The undead keeps biting into his arm. Bleeding profusely, Captain Enrique finally succumbs. The zombie feasts on his body as Noriko and Linda lose their voices screaming. Soon we hear only their HOPELESS PLEADING.

  John Wayne goes to Sarajevo. They feed him, they get him drunk, they show him around. There’s this, there’s that, this is where World War One started, here’s an old mosque. But John Wayne is walking funny, and he finally says: Man, I really gotta piss. They take him to a public toilet. He goes, comes back, his cowboy hat soaked with piss, boots full of it. What happened? they ask him. Well, John Wayne says, I walk into the men’s room and all these guys are at the urinals and they scream: John Wayne! and they all turn to me with their dicks in their hands.

  Bega had started grunting with laughter, swinging his torso in the driver’s seat to replicate the urinary lash, the plush dice bobbing with his movement. He’d clapped his hands following the punch line, his mouth open so wide for the roar that Joshua could see his tonsils. It was still funny: walking toward Magnolia after Bega dropped him off, Joshua kept chuckling to himself. So immersed in a vision of regaling someone with the joke was he that only as he stopped by Kimiko’s place did he realize his bike remained locked up outside Graham’s.

  He considered stopping by to see Kimmy before sleep. The glow in her bedroom window suggested she was reading. Kee-mee-ko. He relished the sound of her name, shaped exactly like her: the long legs, the curved hips, the long hair. He liked her confidence, the peace with which she made decisions. She was a child psychologist, specializing in divorce trauma. Also, molestation trauma. She’d been married once before, right out of college, to a self-professed guy named Haskell Something the Third. She mentioned him rarely, but whenever she did she referred to him as the Third. The Third liked three things: his Porsche, lacrosse, and Newt Gingrich. She never explained the role of the Third in her life, as though the marriage happened to someone else. She analyzed others, but not herself. She read Harry Potter because it helped her better understand her little patients better. She always referred to the kids as little patients.

  Joshua adored the way she laughed: she constricted her mouth, shook her head, then snorted, then exploded. He wanted to serenade her with the John Wayne joke, so he dialed her number from the street: perhaps she would invite him up for a triple-header of laughter, BJ, and full intercourse. But the network was down and his calls were repeatedly dropped and then her light went out. He would’ve rung her doorbell if it wasn’t for his fear of her finding the joke stupid. Moreover, the piss aspect of the joke put extra pressure on his buckling bladder, which now insisted that he quicken his step. That made something down there hurt. Could that be his prostate? By the time he reached his door, merely two blocks down Magnolia, his bladder was bulging to the point of bursting. The mind strives to imagine those things that increase the body’s power. Say, urination.

  He hastily unlocked his front door, dropped the keys and the phone on the table under the cracked mirror, and hurried on to the bathroom. Before he reached it, he noticed the billowing curtains in the living room; he heard the tiny peals of oriental chimes. He was almost sure he hadn’t left any windows open—it was, after all, the end of March. A deep memory of the way late-night ninjas sensed presences was consequently activated and like a ninja he did tiptoe. All flimsy skin and hollow bones, Joshua was practically weightless: he cast no shadow; the floor did not creak. The living room was empty, but dust balls led him, levitating, to his bedroom.

  No deep movie memory was available to help him decide what to do if indeed there was someone in the bedroom. Hence he became instantly paralyzed when he discovered a man kneeling on the floor, weeping with his face buried in what was, without a shred of a doubt, a pair of Joshua’s boxer shorts patterned with stars and stripes. He’d dropped the shorts in the dirty-laundry basket this morning, and there was indeed the wicker basket, pitilessly knocked over, and there was the rest of his dirty underwear lined up on the floor for some perverse inspection. The man’s ponytail was tightly pulled back, fluttering in concert with his sobs; he wore a sleeveless denim jacket, so that the tattoo of an eagle with the earth in its talons was blazingly visible on his sinewy biceps. I know this man, Joshua realized—for a fleeting micromoment, the realization was soothing.

  “Stagger! What the fuck are you doing?”

  Stagger leapt to his feet and charged toward the open window, managing to wipe away his tears with Joshua’s underwear, as if the actual problem were that he’d been caught crying. He batted the billowing curtains apart and slipped out like a true ninja and the former marine that he was. Stagger, it might be pertinent to mention, was Joshua’s landlord and downstairs neighbor.

  The room was cold as a morgue. His prostate hurt like hell, but Joshua sat down on his bed, puffing out vapor, and stared at the boxer shorts array on the floor as if it contained a message that needed to be urgently decoded. His heart was galloping toward a heart attack, his brain away from comprehension. He let out a primally inarticulate scream at the still-billowing curtains and went over to shut the window. He kicked up the boxer shorts arrangement. The heart was pounding, the prostate collapse imminent, but Joshua lay down on the bed to look up at the motionlessly indifferent ceiling fan.

  A siren wailed down the street, reminding Joshua that time sometimes did flow forward on its way to consequences. He did wish the police to come by, but that was all he was going to do about it. In the mind there is no free will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so on to infinity. He would’ve watched the ceiling to infinity, had his bladder not started leaking.

  When the going gets tough, the tough might find comfort in the smallest of pleasures: Joshua’s urine stream was thick and steady with relief.

  When Joshua had signed the lease the previous summer, Stagger had appeared as stolid and reliable, his cut-off denim jacket notwithstanding, as one would expect from a marine who’d proudly served his country. But soon after moving in, Joshua could occasionally hear Guns N’ Roses blasting from downstairs, accompanied by the sound of things being smashed and Stagger’s screaming “Watch it bring you to your knees” and such in unison with Axl Rose. More than once, the party would go on for an entire night. The following morning Stagger would come up to apologize and ascribe his appetite for destruction to his alleged Desert Storm trauma. It made him act crazy, he’d said. It hadn’t always been clear to Joshua whether that was a concealed threat or a way to i
nvite pity and forgiveness. Either way, Joshua hoped his continued understanding would keep the rent low. As a way of additional reconciliation, Stagger had offered to show him his samurai sword, so sharp, he’d said, it could slice a running dog in half and both halves would still jump at the same time to catch the Frisbee.

  He was moving out of this fucking place, Joshua decided, come the weekend. He should have already moved out for the Guns N’ Roses abuse alone. Above the toilet hung an inexplicable reproduction of a foxhunt painting: red coats and black bubble caps and tall horses and a few clouds bumbling forth over a composed Victorian landscape. Joshua heard his front door clicking, whereupon something shifted in the corner where the fox was frozen in her escape, her future forever foreclosed. The voice Joshua instantly identified as Stagger’s said: “What’s going on in here?”

  In a lightning move, Joshua turned, swinging the dick in his trembling hand to spray—from right to left—the upright toilet seat, the toilet paper roll next to it, A Spinoza Reader, and a basket full of magazines, until he—still emitting spurts onto his own thigh—faced Stagger, who stood akimbo under the hallway light, his face calm and composed to the sharp point of insanity.

  “Everything okay, Jonjo?” Stagger lowered his gaze to grin at Joshua’s trickling dick.

  Joshua broke out of the bathroom, bouncing off Stagger’s flank to fly through the front door, conveniently unclosed. He raced down the stairs, not stopping until he found himself in the middle of Magnolia, where he finally returned his penis to its natural habitat. His groin and pant legs were completely wet, his left hand sticky with panic and urine. With his right one he groped for his cell phone to call the police (another siren wailed up Clark), only to recall the very motion of dropping the keys and the phone on the front-hall table. He rolled up into a squatting pose of pain, but then unrolled like a fern in sped-up footage, because a cab hit the brakes not to run him over. The cabbie, grim as a nightmare, stepped out of the car and said: “Hey, man!”—and Joshua, his mind loosened by the combination of alcohol and Stagger, retorted: “Hay is for horses!”

  * * *

  Naturally, Joshua wished he could reverse the flow of time and make everything the way it had been before he found Stagger sobbing into his filthy underwear. But the before was no longer available, nor would it ever be, while the after was mercilessly launched between the glad ding of Kimiko’s bell and its despondent dong. It was well past midnight, so that when she came down to open the door and look unpleasantly surprised, he was wise enough to appear apologetic. Bushy welcomed him by rubbing his fat-cat ass against his ankle. My fair girlfriend is innocently sleeping, Joshua thought. What would love be without mutually assured oblivion?

  Bushy would not quit and Joshua picked him up. He stroked the cat pantingly telling Kimmy what had happened, minus the details of self-urination, though her smirk indicated that she might’ve found his odor disagreeable. She wore a large Chicago Fire T-shirt, its hem touching her knees. It was a man’s shirt.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “What can I do? He’s my landlord. I can’t go back there. He lives on the first floor.”

  “You could call the police,” she said. She was beautiful, even if her calmness could be interpreted as indifference. He was aware, of course, that the reasonable course of action would indeed be to call the police. But he couldn’t bear the thought of the CPD, ever happy to go gun crazy, confronting the batshit Stagger. Going back was also impossible. Stagger might be trashing his place, for all he knew, wearing Jonjo’s underwear on his head to the soundtrack of “Welcome to the Jungle,” armed with his Desert Storm trauma and samurai sword.

  “What do you want to do?” Kimmy asked again. What he wanted to do was nothing, every day, all day long, until the glacier of time ground everything back into its smooth shape. The force by which a man perseveres in existing is limited, and infinitely surpassed by the power of external causes. He wanted to press up against Kimmy’s warm, soft back and stay there until things sorted themselves out. Music was coming from her bedroom—she liked to read and fall asleep listening to Bach’s cello suites. Everything about her was gentle and sovereign. There was always a self-evident reason for whatever she did, even if he seldom knew what it was.

  There was a reason for the shirt she was wearing as well. His groin and inner thighs were now beginning to itch. The Fire-shirt hem was fondling her knees.

  “I think,” Joshua said, “I need to take a shower right now.”

  “Whatever you want,” Kimmy said. He wanted her to embrace his bepissed body, to kiss him, slipping her tongue into his mouth, to approve of him as he was, to take him unconditionally. It didn’t seem likely at that moment. Bushy suddenly swung his declawed paw at Joshua’s face, missing his eyeball by a missing claw. Joshua dropped him on the floor to trot toward the promise of food.

  “Is that your shirt?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. Why would she wear a soccer shirt? Foreigners wear soccer gear, particularly foreign men. He waited for her follow-up elucidation, but she stayed silent, as if daring him to ask whose shirt it was. He wasn’t so much jealous as he wanted Kimiko to confess that she experienced lust independent of him—the thought of her sovereign lechery turned him on, because it frightened him. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but one of the reasons he was attracted to her was that he couldn’t read her.

  “I might need something clean to wear,” Joshua said. She glanced out the window at a dark back alley, then pulled the shirt over her head and handed it to Joshua, exhibiting her beautiful, lithe body: the perky breasts, the smiley navel, the curly crotch. In the parlance of child psychology, the shirt would be a transitional object.

  In the shower, tired though he was, he acquired a hard-on prompted by the fantasy of Kimmy grabbing the buttocks of a man in the Fire shirt who gradually attained an impromptu shape: he was Kimmy’s fellow therapist; he was a soccer player, therefore tattooed and tall and not Jewish; he was probably Latino, thus automatically adept at fucking on the sly or in threesome formation. Brushing his teeth with Kimmy’s wet toothbrush, Joshua examined his face in the mirror: narrow; his eyes too big and sunken; an archipelago of zits stretching below a dandruff-peppered peninsula of hair; the overbite reliably overbiting. He speculated about the man’s name: Hector, Fidel, Enrique. Enrique was the name. Enrique the Fucker.

  Joshua put his clothes into the washer and considered searching the dirty laundry basket for other man-sized clothes. The Kimmy-scented Fire T-shirt reached his mid-crotch. Somehow, inexplicably, she wanted him. At least that was what she’d said the first time they’d hooked up. She could have any other man, a squadron of Enriques, but she wanted him. He’d asked her to tell him what it was in him that attracted her, but she never wanted to talk about it. Only once did she say: “I love the way you think without thinking,” and he hadn’t dared to ask whether she would like him more if he thought with thinking, or, perhaps, if he didn’t think at all. He’d asked her instead if she loved his naked body, and she’d rolled on top of him. Only later would he realize that the subsequent coitus allowed her to avoid answering. It was all terribly disconcerting, as he thought (without thinking) that she could at any time look at him and realize her mistake. This relationship: the fanciest item in Joshua’s fear booth.

  When he slipped into bed next to her, Bach was off and she was hugging Bushy. Joshua inched toward her and pressed his dick, at attention again, into her lower backside like a gun. She smelled of lavender.

  “Kimmy!” he whispered. “Kimmy!”

  She did not move. He held her at dickpoint for another moment, in the hope she would change her mind and roll over to him, and confirm that, as of tonight, she chose to let her lust loose upon him.

  “I have two little patients tomorrow morning,” she whispered.

  Joshua repositioned to look up at the ceiling. They seldom had sex before sleep—when she was done with the day, she immediately directed her attention to the next one. S
ometimes he managed to wedge himself into her schedule and solicit a random fuck. The ceiling fan was moving above in the dark, like a killer drone. A Harry Potter book lay like a brick on the nightstand.

  But then Kimmy released Bushy, rolled over to him, and placed her dainty hand on his undainty cock.

  “What about the little patients?” whimpered Joshua.

  “They’ll be fine,” Kimmy said, “they’re just spoiled little brats.” She moved her hand in all the right directions, and, as Enrique bled to death in the shower, Joshua submitted himself to the pleasures of being the chosen one.

  * * *

  She’d left for work when he woke up. A world of unavoidable actions presented itself to Joshua. First, the least painful: he transferred his damp clothes to the dryer. Then he went back into the bedroom to rummage through Kimmy’s life: his current status as the chosen one demanded further confirmation.

  Kimmy had many fashionable pieces of clothing in her closet: tasteful dresses, delicate blouses, silky stockings, most of which he’d never laid eyes on in the seven months they’d been dating. When did she wear those things? She was from elsewhere, and not just because she was Asian; it was because beyond her appearances there was the unknown. He had never met anyone from her work, least of all Enrique; her family was forever in California. Linda notwithstanding, all of her friends were in New York or Los Angeles. She had a much older sister she hadn’t spoken to in months; she had thoughts she never expressed. He moved on to her dresser drawer: her ascetic running gear, her lacy bras, her diminutive underwear. He pressed his nose into the scentful pair of her porn-red panties—she always kept bags of dry lavender in her drawers. From the depths of the duvet, Bushy watched him inspecting Kimmy’s jewelry. Joshua was just about to feel creepily stupid when in the far corner of her bottom drawer he discovered, still in its original packaging, a shiny cock ring.