Zombie

by J. R. Angelella

  I open the Scrabble board game and pluck out a pair of underwear and step into them, pulling them up. Mom bought me underwear as a back-to-school present a few weeks back, the kind people call tighty-whiteys. I hide them in the box of the board game Scrabble and keep it in my closet because I know Dad hates board games that make him think or have the potential to make him look stupid in front of someone dumber than him, so I know that he will never find them in that box. Scrabble holds my underwear and all of the other board game boxes hold my women’s magazines.

  Dad says that real men don’t wear underwear. He says real men wear boxers. For his back-to-school gift, Dad bought me a week’s worth of boxers, but I haven’t worn them yet. They’re all white with a button at the crotch … like what he is wearing. I hate how everything just hangs loose in them and you have to unbutton them to pee standing up and then button them up when you are finished. At least with underwear, you have the hole you can snake your dick through.

  Sometimes it’s just easier to sit down.

  29

  Barefoot by the window, Tricia’s blinds are open and there is a light on inside, but she is not there. Cars drive past our house the way old men drive, signaling turns a mile in advance … and dangerously slow.

  The night Mom left, her and Dad had been arguing. Jackson was away at school, probably fucking some girl in her dorm room. Dad called Mom a whore and slut and Mom begged him to keep his voice down so that I wouldn’t hear. Glass shattered somewhere. I heard almost everything.

  “I’m unhappy,” she said.

  “Preach that shit to the choir,” he said.

  I snuck out of my room and down to the landing, peering through the bars in the railing, watching them separate, but crash back together like they had a rubber band tied between them. Mom rooted through her purse and pulled out a prescription bottle. Dad knocked it to the floor as tiny blue pills scattered, flipping and spinning. Morphine. MS Contin. Thirty milligrams. To kill the pain. Mom made a call and came upstairs to say goodbye. She sat next to me on my bed, but not really for me. She looked at my zombie posters on the ceiling, then covered her mouth, but didn’t cry. They couldn’t cover up her demon shadows.

  Dad entered my room, a Marine charging a hill. Right above him was a Night of the Living Dead poster. The black-and-white one-sheet with the little girl zombie. Looked like she was about to fall from the sky and feast on him. Dead face with black eyes, hungry lips, and wavy matted hair flowing everywhere.

  A car horn—loud and repeated blasts.

  “You don’t know him,” she said to Dad, “but he keeps his Purple Heart in a box under the bed, not on his wall like some goddamn child.” Mom ran down the stairs, and Dad followed. Then so did I. A van pulled up to the curb and a big black man got out and when Dad saw Mom’s new man Dad’s shoulders dropped forward like an organ had been plucked from his body, and everything else had shifted down.

  “Rinny,” he said. The man—who I have come to know as Zeke—had tree trunk arms, a thick neck, and wore a baseball cap tugged down low on his face, the right way to wear a baseball hat. He looked exactly like Carrefour, in the film I Walked with a Zombie. Mom looked like Betsy Connell, the young Canadian nurse who travels to the West Indies to care for a woman suffering from some kind of weird, walking comatose state. I remember when I first saw this movie. Everyone looked the same, that old Hollywood standard. Except for Carrefour. He was muscular, lean, with intense eyes that ate your soul. He popped off the screen, something wildly different and exciting. Which is maybe how Zeke was for Mom. Zeke opened the door to his van, lifted her into the passenger seat, slammed the door shut, and drove off with her, while dad just stood there in the doorway, watching as the van signaled a turn, traveling at a dangerously slow speed.

  30

  The front door is open, but Mom stands outside. She holds her purse in front of her, like she has a concealed weapon hidden away just in case. A stun gun. A pearl handled revolver. Definitely not a Minigun. Definitely not a baseball bat.

  Dad yells to me from the living room. “Jeremy, your mother is outside. And I heard the fucking horn.”

  “I’m dressed. I’m ready,” I say, running down the stairs to the foyer. “Coming.” I stop at the door and wave to Mom, who smiles and waves back.

  “Hi, baby,” she says. She looks tired like Dad—barely alive. She opens the door and steps inside, as Dog runs over and sniffs her feet, wagging his tail like windshield wipers in a hurricane. Mom crouches down to pet her, kissing her on the nose. “Doggers! I miss you so much.”

  “You’re not outside,” Dad says to Mom. He sits on the couch still in a pair of white boxers and a white tank top. Dad has dug out his old Marine dog tags from the box of war in his office closet. The silver tags hang low and clink together as he moves. “Get back outside.”

  Mom stands, pulling herself away from Dog.

  “Now,” he says. I can tell that Dad hasn’t slept. He has that glazed look of a hangover, something I’ve seen Jackson recover from often enough. I scan his arms and legs, looking for needle marks or bruises or cuts on his skin—some clue, some sign. Nothing. I only see his eyes—desert dry, unblinking and trained on Mom like a sniper. His beer bottles and paper plate of Chinese from last night are still on the coffee table, now neighbors to a mug of black coffee. “You don’t live here anymore, Corrine. This is not your house anymore. Got it?” He gets louder—“UNDERSTAND?”—then looks back to the TV.

  “Fuck you, Ballentine,” she says.

  Now for the uninformed, I feel I need to review a previous topic—zombie speed. When zombies attack, and I’m specifically referencing recent cinema, they are quick and agile, not cat-like, but ferociously fast. They burst through doors and windows, never hindered by the wood or glass. Like in Zombieland. Like in 28 Days Later. They leap fences and scamper up hills, defying gravity and the general properties of motion. In this moment, Dad absorbs these qualities. He rockets from the couch, clawing at the air, barreling towards Mom. His breathing is controlled and quiet. He doesn’t speak, instead reaches the foyer and stops, sliding on the hardwood floor. Mom flinches and holds out her hands to protect herself, but he doesn’t touch her.

  She says, “You haven’t changed one bit.”

  He says, “I told you, get out of my house.”

  She says, “This is still my home too.”

  He says, “Who said this was a home, let alone your home?”

  Mom studies him a moment, then turns and walks outside.

  Dad goes back to his TV.

  All I want is to climb a tree and wait for them both to leave again—Mom to Zeke’s and Dad to wherever he goes. On the flat screen is a reenactment of a man rock climbing, and then through a series of quick cuts, he falls and gets trapped under a giant boulder—his arm pinned down, trapped. A dramatic voiceover describes how the man is contemplating cutting off his own arm to survive. Dad raises his fists and I raise mine. We pound them together.

  Dad says, “You know I’m not stopping you from seeing her.” Dad doesn’t look away from the TV. “She is your mother. Just not my wife.”

  The apocalypse is at hand.

  31

  Another State Fair memory. Same trip as the last one. Long before Dad told me how he shot people, though.

  We were on our way to the pavilion to watch the cattle auction when we passed one of those strong man kiosks where you slam the rubber mallet sledge hammer against the platform as hard as you can to make the silver ball fly up the track and ring the bell. Dad stopped us, pulled out two bucks, and handed them to me. He told me to give it to the overweight man with the orange visor.

  “Let’s see how strong you are,” Dad said.

  “Ballentine, this is silly. He’s only a child,” Mom said, arms folded across her chest.

  “You’re a child?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Mom smiled.

  “I thought you were a grown up or fourteen, at least,” Dad said.

  I
took the rubber mallet sledgehammer from the overweight man in the orange visor and wrapped my fingers around the handle. Pain snapped in my shoulders. I strained my body, shaking, trying to lift the mallet to show Dad I could do it. The mallet thundered to the ground, nearly ripping my arms from their sockets.

  “Jeremy, be careful, honey. Those mallets are heavy,” Mom said.

  Dad stood next to me, fists clenched, saying, “Come on, son. You can do it.”

  “I can’t lift it, Dad. It’s too heavy.”

  “Not yet,” Dad said.

  “Ballentine, he wants to go.”

  “This time,” Dad said, squatting down, our eye-lines level, “I want you to use more leg muscle.” He slapped his thighs.

  I closed my eyes, straining with every last bit of strength to hit the platform with the mallet. I pushed up from my feet, using whatever leg muscle I had. The mallet, not far off the ground, thumped back down.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “You gave it your best. Now watch. I want to show you what you were doing wrong.” He grabbed the handle in both hands, lifted it up over his head like he was about to chop a log of wood. Like he was going to behead someone. He growled and slammed the mallet against the platform. The silver ball sailed up the track, just missing the bell.

  “So close, sir,” the overweight man said, turning dollar bills around in his hand so they all faced the same way before stuffing them deep into a pocket of his orange apron. He readjusted his matching orange visor over his balding, freckle-spotted scalp, wiping sweat from his brow with his forearm.

  Dad lifted it again, grunting, before slamming the platform harder this time. The silver ball flew up, but again fell short of the bell. “Fuck,” he yelled, saliva spitting from his lips.

  “Ballentine, these games are rigged,” Mom said, her arms wrapped around me now like a cocoon. I watched his eyes turn onto Mom, dark green marbled eyes, swamp-water green. Her hands gripped my shoulders, like she was squeezing a sponge.

  And that was that. I remember that we never made it to the cows. I remember Mom walked away and Dad took me to Baltonam. I remember the car ride home was silent. I remember Dad slept on the couch that night. I remember Mom took pills and slept on the floor of my room next to my bed.

  I remember back then there was no carpet. Only a hardwood floor.

  32

  The first words out of my mother’s mouth are about my father. She asks me about his health, if he is doing okay. I want to tell her about him disappearing, about the homemade video, or about his tongue extraction days in the Marines, but I don’t think Mom would even know how to help with any of it. Mom looks okay, I guess, still like my mom, but more tired and scattered. She keeps checking her cell phone and looking out the windows for cars in her blind spots. She’s mucho paranoid today.

  We are quiet for much of the drive down to Fell’s Point, moving through neighborhoods that get increasingly worse and then better and then worse again, sometimes driving for blocks at a time where the windows and doors of the row homes are boarded up with cinderblocks.

  “It kills me that I couldn’t take you to school the other day,” she says. “Kills, kills, kills.”

  A woman in a miniskirt, tight black tank top, and high heels paces at a traffic light downtown. She, too, looks tired and scattered, but is looking for cars to approach, rather than avoid, like Mom and her blind spots. The woman runs her hand through her hair, looking up and down the street, waving at cars and blowing kisses. Mom looks at the woman like she is observing a rare animal, something she has heard about but never seen before. The woman leans through a window of a car that has pulled over to the side of the road.

  “She must want to die, the whore,” I say. “Doing something dangerous like that.” I immediately think of Liza the whore in the Rembrandt book Notes from Underground and Liza the whore that Dad is apparently dating. I know it’s a lie. I know it. In my gut.

  “You sound just like your father.”

  “That’s funny. Dad says the same thing, except how I sound just like you.”

  The light flicks green. Mom turns into the tall buildings of Centre City. Steam curls through grates in the street, ascending into the graying sky.

  “I call them hopeless,” she says. “They are without hope.” Mom passes a city bus and continues along the outside of the harbor overflowing with tourists. A small line for the aquarium curls around like a snake’s tail. Large groups of kids stand together in front of antique boats. A wrought-iron fence with giant spikes protects a playground. A giant green jungle gym towers over a turtle-shaped sand box, but children aren’t using either. They’re just standing there. Enormous buildings reach up from the sidewalks into the sky, new buildings within abandoned and condemned city blocks, buildings wrapped in orange construction tape. Yellow tractors and dump bins are parked along the street. Police tape knotted to the door of a row house snaps loose in a breeze.

  “I want to show you something at the end of this street.” We approach a tower of windows. The building rises right the fuck up into the sky and for a moment it seems that the building could just go on and on, an endless ladder of clean, blue glass. The bottom of the building spreads out wide, spanning the majority of the city block. Mom parks Zeke’s van in the half-circle driveway at the building’s entrance.

  “The Prince Edward,” I say, reading the signpost above the lobby doors.

  “It’s the name of the building.”

  “Where does it come from?” I ask. “The name—The Prince Edward.”

  “The financers named it. I think it’s British.” We get out of the van and Mom walks to the end of the street. “I designed it. The apartments and office spaces inside. Designed the floor plan. Fire exits. How big the bedrooms should be. Conference rooms. Bathrooms. Furnished it. Picked out the carpet. Everything.” She tucks her hair behind her ears.

  Across the choppy waters of the Inner Harbor a half-dozen replica Revolutionary War Era ships are tied to a dock. People pay to go onboard and see how life used to be. People will spend money on anything that sounds remotely boring. Fell’s Point reflects in the water. Red brick buildings with chimneys spitting smoke. Rows of homes lining streets, glued together. Every part of Baltimore looks small and fragile and darker from here.

  “You used to be interested in my projects.”

  “I liked the drawings. The plastic copy of the drawings.”

  “The Mylar copy.” Mom looks tired, big eyes with tiny wrinkles at the sides.

  I want to tell her about everything going on with me, in my life, at school, and maybe this is our moment, that moment in movies when the camera zooms in and the music gets super-fucking loud and you are supposed to feel a swelling in your throat or heart or in your lungs. This is the moment right before the zombies attack. I want her to ask about me.

  “Would you like to go up and see the view from the top?” Mom asks.

  “Are we allowed?” And by we, of course, I mean are you allowed, because who in their right mind would let that pillhead anywhere near a building like this.

  “Please,” she says. “If I’m not allowed inside, then who the hell is?”

  33

  The lobby of the building is near completion with a concierge desk and plush sofas and chairs and square end tables and hanging plants, although almost everything is still covered in plastic. There is a security guard by the concierge desk and he has a gun and baton in his belt. As we pass, Mom digs through her purse, making herself obnoxiously busy, shooting him a friendly, cute, little smile. He’s a big boy, overweight, but not in a fat way, rather in the kind of way that he might really have big bones and would probably crush me if I leapt for his gun, not that I want to at all. Who leaps anyway? I can’t remember the last time I leapt anywhere. His badge says Security Officer George. Mom finds her laminated pass and shows it to him and he waves her on.

  I wonder if he could hear all the pills crashing and bottles clinking in her purse like I could.

  We ride an elev
ator that overlooks the Inner Harbor through a glass wall; rising up, up, up, up to the top floor of the high rise, skyrocketing up over Baltimore, twenty-two floors up. This must be what a bottle rocket feels like. The elevator stops and the doors open and we step out into a long narrow hallway, a dark green carpet covered in heavy, industrial plastic.

  Mom leads me to an open door at the end. It’s dim by the elevator, but the room at the end is overexposed with light cutting through more blue windows. This is a zombie’s wet dream as far as attack spaces go—there is no exit! You get half a dozen living dead fucks on either end of the hallway and each of these doors are locked, forget about it. End of game. Game over. I look at Mom and her weak body, her heavy eyes and sluggish speech. She’s too fucked up to fight. I’d have to carry this one on my own, but I didn’t even bring my big bastard with me.

  “They keep them off during the day to save money since it’s not move-in ready. They’re still selling units.”

  “It’s a big building.”

  “One of the tallest buildings in the entire city. It’s been a great job. People will wake up in a room I designed. They will work every day in spaces that I invented. And the financers are even thinking that if the spaces rent as quickly as they hope, that as a thank you, they’ll give me my very own suite for free.” Mom covers her mouth with her hands. “How amazing is that? My own suite.” We stop mid-hallway. She grabs my shoulder and turns me toward her. She looks confused or heartbroken or both, I don’t know. “You can come and stay with me. What do you think? They love the work I’ve done. Let me show you what the suites look like. Make up your mind after that. This is the model unit they are showing—the one with all of the light.”

  She walks faster, tripping on the plastic. She enters the suite and disappears. I step carefully on the plastic where it bunches. I reach the doorway and cross over and feel hands grab me and pull me through, casting me into a wall of light. This must be what it’s like to be born—burning hot, white, white light blasting and shocking me into life.