When I first saw NOLD, I thanked Ben out loud like he was in the room. He’s the original zombie killer who completely embodies the fourth Zombie Survival Code—Lock-and-Fucking-Load. The big joke in the original director’s cut is that Ben survives the zombie nightmare, his night of the living dead, only to be shot dead by the police as he comes out of the house. They think he’s a zombie. They lock-and-load and don’t think twice about it. There’s that bitch-slap to the balls that I was talking about. Most days, I wish I had a little bit of Ben in me. Not in me like in a sex kind of way, but in me like a hero kind of way.
I nearly drop Tricia’s September issue of InStyle when the house phone rings. The answering machine picks up and Dad’s voice shouts out his specific voicemail instructions.
You’ve reached Mister Ballentine Barker. He is not available, which means he is not here. Leave your message in the following order, or your message will not be returned: first name, last name, phone number, brief reason for your call, first name again, last name again, phone number again. Then hang up. You have less than thirty seconds.
There is a pause in the message and then the beep.
“Mister Ballentine Barker,” a woman says, laughing. “Your message is the greatest thing. I love it so much. Oh, honey, do I love it.” She sounds like she’s either flirting with him or busting his balls and I can’t tell which. “Oh, God,” she says, collecting herself, controlling her breathing. “This is Grace, your administrative assistant.” Balls. She’s busting his balls. He hates it when people make fun of his message and he really hates it when Grace refers to herself as his administrative assistant. “Where the hell are you? I have been calling your—”
Before Grace has a chance to finish her message, the machine cuts off and Dad picks up. “Sec-re-tary,” Dad says, annunciating the syllables. “Hear how that sounds and embrace it. You are my sec-re-tary?”
I tiptoe along the wall. I hear the sound of turning pages—a book. I reach the end of the hallway and peek around the corner to Dad’s office. The lights are off except for one that hangs over him like a dentist chair lamp. He sits behind his monstrous desk—this thick, antique, wooden beast of a thing, flipping pages of a textbook, wearing glasses, the ones he uses when he has to read small print. His silver tie in a Windsor but loose around his neck, his shirt and suit pants wrinkled—same as he wore this morning. He turns back and forth between two pages.
“The difference between a secretary and an administrative assistant is that at least with an administrative assistant I would have a broad with a brain. Are you listening to me? Clearly, you are not. Clearly, I must be talking to a zombie version of my secretary,” he says.
There should be a soundtrack playing behind me right now—heavy thumping bass, all loud and shit, because I’m being a sneaky and suspicious sonuvabitch. Dad is being a sneaky and suspicious sonuvabitch too, taking me to school like he did, then disappearing and leaving me to take the damn bus home. Even sneakier than me.
“I told you, I’m sick. Do you need me to cough into the fucking phone? Do you need me to fax you a doctor’s note?” he asks. He glances up from his book to the framed photo of himself hung on the wall—his Marine photo, standing next to an American flag in full Marine blues and a young chiseled don’t fuck with me face. He looks back to his book and berates Grace some more, then drops the phone back on the receiver, like a log being dropped on a burning fire.
See ZSC’s one through three—avoid eye contact, keep quiet, forget it all. I disappear into a closet, leaving it open a crack for me to peak through.
I hear Dad whistle in perfect pitch and then say, “Here, girl.” He waits by the hutch, sliding his keys and wallet into his pocket. Dog’s tail thwaps side to side as she trots obediently at his heels, never in front, always behind him as they leave the house. Dad snaps on a black leash, rubbing and scratching behind both of her ears. “That’s my good girl.”
And out the front door they go—my father and the daughter he never had.
13
Dad’s office is an altar—immaculate, symbolic, final.
I sit in his high-back, black leather office chair and it swivels without having to push or set it in motion at all. My feet don’t touch the ground as I spin around and I feel like a kid again. I don’t give the chair any acceleration or gas. It just goes, unattended. Must be a slant in the room. An uneven floor. I scoot to the edge of the chair and plant my feet on the hardwood, wait to gather my bearings, and then shove off, spinning fast, whipping around, the wheels grinding against the floor. Then, calculating the end, I grab for the desk and come to a dead stop.
A teenaged, Marine version of Dad stares at me from the wall—an American flag behind him, no smile, dead eyes and a shorn head. A grunt. He looks so much like Jackson, something I maybe only recognize now. His Purple Heart has a purple ribbon with a gold heart shape medallion with the profile of George Washington on it. Dad has never confirmed that he was ever wounded in Vietnam, which would have been the only way for him to receive the Purple Heart that I know of.
I remember when Dad told Mom that no man or woman was ever going to tell him what to do unless they could match what hung on his office wall. They stood in the kitchen, Mom chopping lettuce for a salad, Dad washing plum tomatoes. I set the dining room table with plates, forks, knives, and cloth napkins held together in a cigar-shaped roll with silver napkin rings. I finished and sat at my Cherub-backed chair and waited. Dad followed her around the kitchen and asked her if she knew what a man had to do to get a Purple Heart and she replied as she always did about sensitive topics, which was to execute ZSC #1 and ZSC #2—avoided eye contact and kept quiet. Mom filled a teakettle with water when Dad finally said, “Match my wall and I will do whatever you want and whatever you will.”
James Dean and Jayne Mansfield hang on the wall behind his desk under framed squares of glass. James Dean is wearing a red jacket with his collar flipped up and a white T-shirt underneath. He is leaning forward, narrowing his eyes. What was he looking at when the picture was taken? His arm crooks in an L-shape, hand en route to lips with a lit cigarette pinched between two fingers. Dad loves James Dean. Dad says James Dean was a real man. Lived fast and died young. Died in a car accident. Yeah. Dad says the same thing about Jayne Mansfield. He says Jayne Mansfield was a real woman. Died in a car accident. Her head was cut off clean from her body. That’s called decapitated. Yeah. But, goddamn, she was sexy!
In her poster, Jayne Mansfield wears a sparkle dress. It’s black and shiny and she is leaning back on a chair, holding a cigarette like James Dean except her cigarette is stuffed inside one of those thin black cigarette holders that all those super-rich women used to smoke through. Anyway, Jayne Mansfield is leaning back and smoking and her hair is super, super blonde and curled up in the front. You can’t see any cleavage. Her tits are pushed down under the dress but she is wearing these gold bracelets and necklaces that show off her pale skin. Dad says that Jayne Mansfield is what all women should be.
I wonder why he married Mom. Mom has brown hair and doesn’t smoke and doesn’t have a Purple Heart.
I pull myself closer to Dad’s monstrous wood desk and examine it like a crime scene. Yellow Post-it notes stick to the desk pad—each with a date, a number, and names.
7/25 4 Beekman, Rogers, Santiago, Williams
8/15 2 Holdsworth, Giorgiano
8/29 6 Andersen, Trout, Druller, Mapleton, Ott, McDowell
9/5 ? ?
Doodles cover other Post-its, drawn in dark, heavy black pen, carved into the paper like they’d been traced hundreds of times. The doodles look crude and violent; body parts wearing Windsor knots—a foot, an arm, an ear, a tongue. Everywhere I look I see more body parts with fat knots. More numbers and more dates. Older dates going back before July and more names.
Everly, Kleaversdorf, Vaille, Goodwell, Robison, Price, Young.
The handwriting is small—no, not small, tiny.
There is an open book, a dissected face diagra
med and cut down into specific parts, showing the layers of muscles and nerves and bone. I flip it closed with my thumb as a placeholder and run my fingers over the red fabric of the cover: Christopher’s Textbook of Surgery. I push back from the desk and open his desk drawers, descending, starting at the top and moving down with increasing speed. I dig through pens and legal pads, a calculator and realty brochures and business cards with Dad’s face and fake fucking smile, a home office medical kit filled with Band-Aids, gauze, a tiny bottle of iodine, and medical manuals on emergency field surgery. I flip through hanging folders, mostly bills and birth certificates, social security cards, and bank statements, but also Dad’s not-so-secret collection of seventies Playboys. Mainly girls with hairy bushes and big hair. Dad doesn’t know that I know about his handful of old man magazines because Jackson showed me once when I was asking him questions about boobs and why they all had different sizes. The pages are fragile, stiff and wrinkled from water damage. These magazines were the magazines that Dad carried with him when he was in the shit, as he likes to say, soaked through from the torrents of rain.
His magazines are nothing like my magazines.
I open his office closet. It looks like an evidence locker in the basement of a police station. A floor-to-ceiling shelving unit bursts at the seams with boxes of all sizes. Thick black words mark boxes in years—1987, 1996, 2001—or in names and associations—Jackson/College, Corrine/Medical Rehab, Jeremy/Summer Camp, Ballentine/Brochures, Dog/Veterinarian. Minimal, cold, exact.
I thumb through the more accessible boxes at the bottom of the closet marked in years. Boring shit mostly—incomprehensible financial paperwork with tricolored pie charts and line graphs and percentage numbers. I move on to a few boxes marked with names and associations, but they really interest me less, that is except for one.
It’s clearly the largest box in the closet—unmarked, anonymous, a plain brown box. I slide it off the shelf and place it on the floor. The box is deep and heavy and long. I unfold the flaps and find that the box is marked along the inside flaps, with tiny lettering, to be kept a secret.
Ballentine Barker’s Box of War.
Inside, there’s a story. First, a canteen. I shake it. It’s empty, but I unscrew the top anyway and am hit with the smell of some kind of alcohol. Whisky, I think—something Dad said he always asked my grandparents to send him. An envelope holding a necklace with two silver tags, dog tags. Folded, faded maps—absolutely nothing recognizable to me. A stack of Polaroids. Young Dad holding big guns. Dad standing with other Marines, holding their own big guns. Dad and other Marines with their big guns at the camera. Other Marines with their big guns at each other. Smaller guns to their own heads. Their big guns at photos of naked women with big bushes taped to the wall of their barracks. Dad looks thin and clean cut, wide-eyed, but not in a scared way, instead in a wide-eyed, let-too-much-light-in kind of way. He smiles in most of the photos, a similar smile to the fake fucking one he has in all of his realtor materials. Dad wears a green T-shirt and camouflage, smokes a cigarette, his arm around another Marine, a blond guy. They stand in front of a jungle that’s completely in flames. The caption reads: OBLIVION. In another picture, Dad drinks a can of beer, standing over a dead body—face down on the ground. The dead body is missing an ear, like it had been cut clean off. Dried blood caked around the wound from where it dripped down the side of his face. It was so clear that I could even see flies that had landed on the body. Pictures of foreign women in bars barely dressed—whores or hopeless women in short skirts with a lot of make-up. Some make kissy faces at the camera. Two girls French kiss in a blurry haze of red and green neon light. A girl hangs on Dad’s arm and the girl isn’t Mom. The girl is Asian. Another picture of Dad, sitting on a cot in a tent, shirtless, dog tags dangling down—above him a sign written in red paint: FUCK THIS SHIT. The last picture is a profile picture, like George Washington in the Purple Heart. Dad is sticking out his tongue through a smile.
My hand brushes up against something cold. It looks wet or frozen or recently shined. Resting there. If it had teeth, it would have bitten my hand clean off. Black handle. Pinky-finger-sized hole. A body and a chamber. Curved angles. Masterful arcs of steel. I flip it over like it’s a dead fish—not wet or frozen. Heavy and recently cleaned as a streak of grease rubs onto my hand. I feel the weight of the gun in my hand. An electric charge races through my body, etching under my skin. I raise it and aim it at Young Dad. I hold it steady, not ready to let go, locking it away into my own personal prison. I release the air from my body in a long controlled exhale, a smooth and single stream, and when I don’t have any air left in my body to keep me alive I pull the trigger.
The gun—click.
The front door—bang.
The gun isn’t loaded.
The gun is still in my hand and Dad is coming through the door, struggling with Dog’s leash. Shit. I tuck the gun back into the Ballentine Barker Box of War, slap the flaps down. Shit. Dad couldn’t be making any more noise in the foyer if he tried, coughing, grunting, walking, moving, breathing, whatever-the-fucking. His presence sounds immediate, like he’s on top of me. Like he’s in the office. Like he’s standing over me, towering. Shit. Dog scrambles across the hardwood floor, released from the leash, her nails scratching as she moves through the house—foyer, dining room, kitchen. She drinks her water, her tongue slapping the water—a tired dog after a hard run. I stop moving and listen for him but don’t hear anything until he calls out my name. Shit. The hardwood floors creak and tremor under his heavy steps as he sweeps the first floor looking for me like I did him. Shit. I lift the box of war back to its shelf and slide it into place, pushing it against the wall.
Zombie Survival Code Three.
Erase, forget it, get gone.
Never knew a thing.
Never happened.
14
Dad shouts my name from the foyer again. Frankly, I’m surprised he remembers me at all. I sneak out of his office when his back is turned. He closes the front door and finally finds me standing in the foyer too. I could have come from anywhere and he knows it.
“I got a call from your school today,” he says.
“It was only Algebra,” I say.
“Did you get lost?” he asks. “The school is one giant hallway. I don’t understand how you get lost in one giant hallway.”
“You didn’t pick me up after school,” I say. “More than that, you disappeared last night and didn’t come home until this morning.”
Dog sits by his feet, licking her chops.
“Good girl,” he says. “Good girl.” Dad slaps her side in hard thuds.
“If you won’t tell me where you were last night, then tell me where you were this afternoon?”
He hangs Dog’s leash over the banister and steps past me.
“I asked you a question,” I say. I run down the hallway, and step in his way.
“You’re as neurotic as your fucking mother,” he says. “Fine. You want to know. I was with Liza.”
“Liza? Who the fuck is Liza?”
“Please move,” he says.
“Stop lying to me.”
“Please, Jeremy.”
“Were you with Liza last night? Or just this afternoon?”
“I’m sorry for not telling you about her sooner,” Dad says without anything behind it. “She’s someone I’ve been seeing. She’s an ER nurse at Johns Hopkins, so her schedule is always changing.”
“Call her up,” I say. “Get her on the phone. I want to talk to her. I want to meet her. Let’s make a meet-the-family date. Chinese and an old zombie classic. I Walked With a Zombie. Chicks dig black-and-white, right, Dad? You taught me that. Call her up.”
“I’ll be in my office,” he says, placing his hands on my shoulders and gently moving me out of his way.
“What’s her last name? Where does she live?”
Before Dad disappears into his office, I clap my hands together. It startles him. Dad looks back at me.
“Where were you?” I ask.
He kicks his office door closed. The fuck.
I press my ear to the door. Silence simmers inside. String-based orchestral music soon slices away the nothingness, before heavy brass marches in.
“I can still hear you,” I say, punching the door. “Can you hear me?” I punch the door with both hands now. “What’s her last name?” My fists flatten against the wood. Holding the door steady with one hand, I slap the door with the other, machine-gunning. I bang harder and louder and call him by name—Ballentine, Ballentine, Ballentine! I turn the knob and push and pull, throwing all of my weight behind it, but the door doesn’t budge and instead makes a clunk-clunk sound. I keep fucking banging and will continue to bang until he opens up and tells me about the picture of the dead body in his box of war and how he was wounded in Vietnam and the gun and how this all has to do with some whore named Liza or something else altogether.
15
The earliest memory I have of Dad is: disappearing.
The house was empty.
I walked from room to room. The lights were off. I didn’t turn them on, or call out his name, for fear of disturbing whatever might be inside.
Dad was gone.
I searched. I scoured. A human flashlight, flicking on lights in every room, ridding them of nothing. Under the dining room table by the cherubs carved into the wooden chairs. Behind the couch in the living room. In his immaculate office. Under the monstrous desk in his immaculate office. In the closet next to the monstrous desk of his immaculate office. It felt like he wanted me to find him. Like we were playing hide-and-seek. I opened the front door and turned on the outside light that lit up the night in a damning shade of a dark glow, the pumpkins seemingly bigger, casting shadows. Bushes and trees looked like monster claws and demon smiles. I listened for him, recognizing nothing.
Zombie Page 5
