All of which seemed rather quaint now.
“Why not?” Eddie said, trying not to sound like a whiny little bitch. Mona stood before him, implacable. More infuriating than her unwillingness to comply with his simple, reasonable request was her refusal—or was it inability?—to elaborate. She’d gotten them every little goddamn thing, but now this sudden veto? It made no sense. Eddie mopped his forehead and stared in disbelief at this petite yet immovable object. He blinked as a stinging trickle of perspiration leaked into his eye.
“No guns,” she repeated.
“But come on, it’s a good idea. You know it.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
“But we could start takin’ ’em out. We could cut a path for you ahead of time.”
“Don’t need one.”
“Maybe we could even go out. You ever think about that?”
“No guns.”
“Fine, we’ll discuss this later. Maybe hold a vote. You believe in democracy or are you some kind of . . .” He stopped himself. What was he going to call her? A commie? That seemed a little out-of-date. “Maybe the others can convince you.”
“Nope.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.” Uninflected. It wasn’t even snotty. He hated that. Eddie turned his back on her and stomped upstairs, pausing for a second to pound on Dave’s door and bark, “Dave-o, grab your gear, we’re goin’ fishin’!”
On the roof, Dabney snored as he napped under his rickety lean-to. Eddie couldn’t understand why he chose to live outside like an animal. Fuckin’ moolie would probably be happier living up in a coconut tree. Eddie scowled as he waited for Dave. Fuckin’ Mallon might’ve gone homo, but at least he still knew how to be a man, have fun like a man, whatever. The whole gun thing had put Eddie in a foul mood. Why that stupid little cunt couldn’t see the advantage to scoring some firepower was beyond him. What, she was afraid of guns? Guns could do some serious damage to those rotten skinbags down on the street. That’s not a plus? Please. Eddie thought about his little encounter in his old digs. A piece would’ve been sweet. Pow! From ravenous zombie to dark, wet stain.
“What’s up?” Dave said as he barged onto the tarpaper.
“Shhh, I don’t wanna rouse the eggplant,” Eddie whispered. “You brought the gear bag?”
“Yeah, but what’s it for?”
“The Comet wants to go sport fishing, bro.”
“Huh?”
Eddie beckoned Dave to follow him across several rooftops until they reached the one furthest south. Eddie opened the bag and pulled out the two heavy-duty Penn reels. “You can reel in a fuckin’ three-hundred-pound marlin with these babies,” Eddie grinned.
“So?”
“So, we’re going hump angling, Davy. Gonna catch me a zombie, bro.”
Dave stood back and watched as Eddie put together the rod-and-reel assembly. For a change it wasn’t that hot, but sweat poured off Eddie’s brow like a mini-Niagara. His eyes were wild. “This’ll be just like angling for marlin or sailfish or shark or any of those big motherfuckers. You remember that fishing trip we took to Costa Rica, bro? Same as that, only better.”
“Eddie, dude. I dunno, man, this is a little weird, don’tcha think? I mean, what if you actually catch one? And what are you gonna use for bait?”
“You mean you don’t wanna get on the hook? I’m just fuckin’ with you. Okay. Okay, I don’t need to use a lure, okay? I can make a noose. Oh, dude, that is perfect. What an awesome combo: fishin’ and lynchin’. Call it flynchin’! Oh, dude, that’s genius. Genius!”
Scary is what it was, Dave thought. Eddie seemed more agitated lately, a little zippy. But not zippy as in zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay. Zippy like that time he did three consecutive lines of blow in the men’s room during a company holiday party with one of the traders. Tweaked.
“Eddie, have you been taking those pills you filched from Mona?”
“Ix-nay on the ills-pay, bro. Keep your voice down. I don’t want the nigger to hear.”
“You have been, haven’t you? You even know what they are?”
“They’re her fuckin’ secret,” Eddie whispered, teeth clenched. “Why else does she got so many of them, huh? Dude, it’s so perfectly clear. I figured it out.”
Eddie stood up, rod and reel ready for action, and cast the line into the crowd below. Within seconds the line jerked, the tip of the rod dipping. Eddie positioned himself behind a sturdy metal steam pipe, bending at the knees for more leverage. “Grab my waist,” he commanded as he laughed in triumph. “This bitch ain’t gettin’ away!” Dave wrapped his arms around Eddie’s midriff and dug his heels in. Eddie dipped forward. The thing on the end of his line was putting up a struggle. His bronze biceps bulging with each crank of the reel, Eddie looked like a well-oiled part of the apparatus. It was about the most absurd image Dave could conjure: two men on a roof, aping the Heimlich maneuver, attempting to reel in a zombie
“Help me reel this cocksucker in!” Eddie roared, no longer caring about Dabney.
Dave added muscle and soon a rotted head appeared at the edge of the roof, monofilament cutting into its wrist, which was caught between the noose and its neck. Eddie yanked the rod vertical, cackling at the sight of the zombie’s stricken visage. For something brain-dead it looked plenty scared and more than a little pissed. Thick blackened blood oozed from where the line was scoring the epidermis and it groaned piteously. Eddie jerked the rod again, attempting to haul his quarry over the edge. Instead the line cut straight through the purulent flesh and dismembered the wretched thing. With the zombie’s weight no longer balancing them, the sportsmen toppled backward, Eddie’s coccyx crunching against Dave’s groin, eliciting a doglike yelp. Dave rolled out from under his laughing companion and cradled his injured batch.
“Almost got ’im,” Eddie guffawed. “The little fish that got away!”
“Who fuckin’ cares?”
“What’s your problem?”
“Never mind.” Dave lay there moaning, cupping his area.
“Wanna give it another go?”
“Do I look like I wanna?”
“Pfff. What a killjoy. S’matter with your nads, bro?”
“Forget it, okay? Just forget it.”
Eddie sauntered over to the roof wall and looked down, his prize absorbed by the crowd, no sign of it below.
“That sucks,” he said.
“Well, what would you have done with it, anyway? Hung it over the mantelpiece?”
Eddie slipped a hammer out of a loop in his shorts. “I wanted to smash all its teeth out and then basically torture it for a while. Cut on it and take it apart and shit.”
“Oh. Sorry that didn’t work out for you.”
Eddie smiled and said, “Thanks,” not catching the unconcealed sarcasm in Dave’s voice. Eddie clapped his bud on the shoulder and said, “We can try another time, right, amigo?” Dave nodded. “I’m goin’ back down, you coming?” Dave shook his head. “A’right, catch you later, bro.”
Eddie trotted across the rooftops, then disappeared into the stairwell. As Dave stepped onto their roof, Dabney sat up and said, “Your homeboy is a goddamn lunatic, you know that, don’t you?” Dave nodded again. He was temporarily out of words. Words just didn’t seem to cut it right about now. Even “inadequate” seemed inadequate.
From his bed, Karl lobbed the Good Book across the room. What was so good about it? It was riddled with riddles, chockablock with useless parables. No wonder people spent their whole lives reading the same tome over and over and over again. No one could make sense of this, at least not in a practical, how-to-apply-this-to-my-daily-grind kind of way. Karl had always noted people reading the Bible in public, especially on the subway. Mostly black and Hispanic people, predominantly women, their brows always creased in intense concentration, and highlighter pens poised to accentuate key passages for future rumination. Maybe it was racist, but Karl had been then, and was now even more, convinced that though they read the individual words, the su
m made no sense to these devout ladies and occasional gent. Karl had gone to college and couldn’t fathom half of what he read and reread.
Karl knew there was a God, but His guidebook was the work of human beings, and humans could seldom be trusted. It was a book created by committee, too, which also didn’t bode well. Karl had a rule of thumb: any movie with more than three screenwriters was likely going to suck. The stories in the Bible had been circulated plenty before they were set down in ink. It was like the telephone game.
Big Manfred had an LP called, Satan is Real, by these gospelers, the Louvin Brothers. Big Manny had found nothing funny about it, however, especially not its title. Satan was real to the old man, and there was nothing even remotely amusing about that. Sure, the record cover displayed a hokey image—the lily-white brothers dressed in snappy white suits in the flaming pits of hell, a ridiculous cardboard-looking red devil on the horizon—but the album’s message was clear: don’t sin, obey the Bible, be a good Christian. Simple as that. The weirdest part was the brothers looked mighty cheery as they simultaneously preached and roasted.
Karl rolled over onto his stomach to ease the knot there, a combination of hunger and disquietude. He hadn’t eaten in three days in protest of the food procured by Mona, but what if he was wrong? Maybe she wasn’t in league with Lucifer, in which case this boycott was in vain. Plus, if she were an emissary of the Lord, wouldn’t his hunger strike be blasphemous? It wasn’t like he could just ask her, either. If she were a hellish minion, surely she would lie and say otherwise. But if she was sent by God, she’d likely lie or evade the question, too. It was not for him, a mere mortal, to question divine intervention. And as sure as he was that God existed, he wasn’t as certain about Beelzebub. Karl always figured the devil was the invention of man, kind of a scapegoat for rotten behavior. Why be burdened with personal accountability when you could blame Satan?
“This is unbearable,” Karl moaned into his pillow. He dropped off the bed and assumed a posture of supplication, interlacing his fingers and tilting his head heavenward. “Am I being tested? I mean, wasn’t I being tested before Mona arrived? Isn’t this whole stinking mess a test? If I starve myself, isn’t that protracted suicide, which is a mortal sin? So, I guess what I’m saying is, I should eat, right? If Mona is here on Satan’s behalf, I’ll need my strength to outwit her, right? Or if she’s one of Yours, I should . . .”
What was the point? He gave up. No answer was forthcoming, ever. Maybe on Judgment Day. Karl wondered if the line into Heaven was like the ones at Six Flags. Each depiction he’d ever seen of the line to the Pearly Gates was evocative of the ones at every theme park he’d ever attended. Did technology in the afterlife move forward as it did in life? Had Saint Peter upgraded from The Book of Life to a computerized database? Maybe he just had a BlackBerry or an iPhone.
This was madness. What the hell was he thinking? Karl punched his thighs and attempted to refocus. He was out of practice in the hunger racket. He’d become accustomed to eating regularly again, and now, three days empty, he was going mental.
He stood up and did some jumping jacks and toe touches; grade school calisthenics. He looked in the mirror. Five-and-a-half-feet of solid dork. He trotted into the kitchenette and tore open a Slim Jim, devouring it in three barely chewed bites. Then another. And another. He attempted to eradicate the pungent aftertaste with two cans of Mountain Dew, then felt buzzy as the double shot of caffeine coursed through his system, accompanied by a volley of violent vurps.
An image of Mona popped into his forebrain, tan and bare bellied, radiant as Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.” Karl snatched the Bible off the floor and contemplated swatting himself in the groin to subdue any impure thoughts. Sinners of yore were often self-flagellants. Did medieval times call for medieval measures of self-purification? The caffeine, the caffeine, the caffeine. And whatever dastardly additives there were in those Slim Jims. Oh mercy.
“Jesus H. Christ!” he groaned as he swatted himself in the ’nads.
31
“So what’s your story?” Ellen asked as Mona sat across from her. They were seated in Mona’s apartment, one by each window, Ellen slowly rocking in the Spiteri’s creaking old rocker, Mona motionless in her usual chair, feet propped on the windowsill.
“My story?”
“I don’t mean to sound confrontational. Or intrusive. I’m sorry. But yes, your story. Where are you from? Who were your parents, what is your background? Who are you, basically? How do you survive? How come the things don’t attack you?”
“I guess they don’t like me.”
Ellen frowned at Mona’s stock response. “No, I mean really. Okay, look, I don’t want you to feel like you’re on the spot. This isn’t an interrogation. Just two girls having a chin-wag, okay? Where are you from?”
“Here.”
“Here, where?”
“Around here.”
“Yorkville.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What street?” It’s like pulling teeth.
“Seventy-seventh. And Second.”
“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. I grew up in Melville, Long Island. You know where that is? It’s near Huntington. I went to Walt Whitman High School. Where did you go to high school?”
“Didn’t finish.”
“I see. But before you didn’t finish, where did you go?”
“Talent Unlimited.”
“Really? That’s a performing arts school, isn’t it? You went there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay,” Ellen said, stretching out the second vowel, and when that produced no elaboration, added, “And what did you take? What was your talent?” Did that come out sarcastic? This girl was unbelievable. She was the most unforthcoming individual Ellen had ever met and it was really trying her patience. But she’d break her, yes she would. What was her talent? Stonewalling?
“Singing.”
“Really? And yet you’re so quiet.” Again, was that sarcastic? Ellen couldn’t tell, but apparently neither could Mona, who sat there, unruffled as ever.
“Uh-huh.”
“What kind of singing? Jazz? Gospel? Pop?” Pop? Ellen felt like an old lady.
“Opera. Mezzo-soprano.”
Unbelievable. Ellen took a few to absorb this startling tidbit. Whether Mona had been any good or not—or for that matter was still any good—was immaterial. It was almost unimaginable that this introverted girl sang opera. And what about the din always pummeling her eardrums? That wasn’t opera. Had Mona dreamt of segueing from opera to heavy metal? Hadn’t Pat Benatar done something along those lines? Who could remember? Was it a lie? Was Mona fucking with her? Why would she?
She wouldn’t.
“Isn’t this nice? Getting to know each other?” Ellen smiled hopefully, Mona looked back at her noncommittally and then gazed out the window. Ellen wanted to get out of her seat, casually step over to Mona, gently lift Mona’s chin so that they were looking into each other’s eyes, and then slap the living shit out of her. Ellen had tried, but seriously, enough was enough.
What if the embryo taking form in her uterus turned out to be like Mona? Was it something in the air? Maybe Mona had been a vital, zesty, free spirit before all this—an opera-crooning voluptuary. Maybe the same contaminant that spawned the living dead had stunted her personality. Maybe this was some kind of autism. Certain mold could cause that in developing babies. Maybe she was just displaying the symptoms before the rest of them, a result of her youth. That was a possibility. Maybe she was the first, but in time they’d all follow. Nature was all about adaptation. Mona had forged invisible armor. The zombies didn’t attack her, but maybe the cost of survival was death of the self.
It makes sense. To survive one must adapt.
But what kind of life is that?
Though it was way too early for the agglomeration of cells in her uterus to do anything independent, Ellen felt a kick in the guts nonetheless.
“I’m jerking off to paintings of a
fully clothed girl’s ankles. Wow, I’m so fucking great I can’t stand it. I am the man. I am the greatest living artist and this is what it comes down to. And I had issues about doing whacking material for Eddie? I’m pathetic. Path-et-ic.” Alan tossed the soggy wad of tissue out the window. “Fresh protein, kids!” he shouted to the crowd below. One looked up as the jizz-bomb bounced off his empty eye socket. Alan laughed. “S’matter, Gomez, you don’t like daddy milk?”
He stepped away from the window, no pants, just a sweat-sodden T-shirt. Not since junior high school had he masturbated to his own art, and it didn’t feel good. This was not how he’d envisioned his thirties. But then again, none of the current climate fit the vision of his future he’d had in his past. By thirty he was supposed to have had at least one solo show in Soho, Paris, and London. By thirty he was supposed to have at least one hardbound monograph of his works. By thirty he was supposed to have found true, everlasting love. By thirty a lot of things were supposed to have happened.
Alan sat down across from his most recent canvas, a half-finished portrait of the enigmatic Ms. Luft. The painting was perched on the easel. Behind it was the wall of Mona portraits surrounded by the halo of zombie studies. Across the room were the Ellen canvases and drawings. He couldn’t remember the last time they’d had sex. Had they done it since she’d announced her pregnancy? No. Here he was jerking off to the image of a person who was barely there when he had a real, live, fleshed-out, fully dimensional woman to love. Classic. “Fuck you, Erma Bombeck,” Alan sniped. “I gotta eat something. I gotta eat some peaches. I need a sugar fix. That’s what I’m gonna do. And I’m gonna announce it first and then do it. I’m going to speak in declarative statements announcing my imminent actions and then do them. I am going to get some canned peaches, open the can, eat the contents and then fling myself out the window. What? No. No I won’t.”
But why not?
“Mona’s right. We shouldn’t have guns. Because right about now, a 9 mm lead sandwich sounds very appetizing.”
Pariah Page 22
