Zombie

by J. R. Angelella

  99

  This can’t be him. That couldn’t be him. Not my dad. This cannot be it.

  The room of men step away, leaving the doctors to attend to the injury. The blowtorch is lit and aimed at the wound, scorching it closed. Dad screams, gagging.

  “No,” I say, ripping off my mask and charging the stage, slamming into men along the way, shoving them, telling them to fucking move. Rembrandt is startled and turns to see me racing toward him, but I’m sure he doesn’t know it’s me. I jump up on to the stage but misjudge it and crash down, hitting my shin on the edge of the stage, but keep moving, taking a limp with me. The room which had been growing louder with each amputation is suddenly quiet again. All eyes locked into place. On me. On stage.

  I stand and grab my bat, swinging it back and forth—a warning to keep the fuck back. I hold it low and look up at Rembrandt, the blue-masked motherfucker standing in front of me, letting him see me for the first time.

  “Take it in. Look at me, you fuck,” I say, growling at him. “All of you sick fucks. Back away from me. Back away from my dad.”

  Men move into place around the stage, ready to watch something new, something spontaneous and off-script. Rembrandt doesn’t say anything but rather tilts his head instead. I move towards Dad and swing the bat at the doctors who had been cleaning him up. They jump back, the bat making a whipping sound through the air. Dad slumps on the gurney, crying now. Tears want to surface in my face. My voice sounds like I’m crying, even though I’m not. But there’s a block in me, a pressure keeping it all in. I swing the bat around me again, keeping people back, even though no one is moving in on us. Spots appear again. Maybe a side effect of Ritalin withdrawal. Maybe a side effect of what I’ve just seen.

  “Stay the fuck back. Don’t you fucking come near me.” I look back at him and feel the rush, the surge of something overwhelming and powerful come over me. “Who the fuck are you people? This isn’t what you are supposed to do with yourselves. Dad, no. No, no, no.”

  Rembrandt steps forward, his hands in the air in surrender. “I think it best if you let us help him. He is losing a lot of blood and will surely die if our doctors do not intercede.”

  A surge of pain rises in Dad behind me as he explodes again. His body convulsing. A chicken without a head. Flailing. Fighting to be free. I stay a ways from him. His bandage is loose and only barely begun. Dad doesn’t ask for help. He doesn’t say help me or why or take me to a hospital or I fucking hate you or you fucking bastards or get me out of here. Instead, he cries the word please. Like someone asking politely for something they will never receive. Dad sobs as he slumps off again into shock.

  “Dad. Stay with me, okay? Can you hear me?” I’m screaming now, but no one can hear me. “Why can’t any of you hear me? Why won’t any of you help me? Please, help my dad.”

  Rembrandt, finally, lowers is hands and moves toward Ballentine. “The man clearly needs medical assistance and we’re the ones to give it to him. Not you, boy. You are a child. Why can’t you see that he will die? But we can save him. No one in the whole world will ever come to you, your name will vanish from the face of the earth—as though you had never existed, never been born at all! Nothing but filth and mud, however you knock at your coffin lid at night, when the dead arise, however you cry: Let me out, kind people, to live in the light of day!”

  Zombie dawn. Everything goes down. Choke up. Broken codes are all around. I swing the bat and the bat makes contact with Rembrandt’s head.

  *

  Everything stops and I know it. A freeze-frame. Still picture. Ending to 28 Days Later. A cosmic pause on heartbeats and airways and circulation.

  As I swung the bat and watched it strike my target as I intended it to strike, I collapsed in on myself and wished myself away from everything, but instead of getting zapped into another realm, everything just stopped. And this is the space we exist in for now. A kind and quiet and gentle place.

  Nothing is undone here. Hands not reattached. People not un-drugged, de-sexed, un-plaided, re-booted. People simply stop. The bat looks frozen to Rembrandt’s head. He does not show signs of damage. The men below the stage are mannequins, life-like, positioned and placed perfectly around like a madman’s living room.

  I realize now, here, in this stuck state, that there had been a rattling, snarling demon inside me, growing in strength for some time. Ready to eat its way out. I know this now because I feel nothing now. I am empty now. There is nothing. The heavy, sick darkness stuck inside my skin is gone. Evaporated. Ripped clean. Vaporized. Disappeared.

  I am brand new.

  There is nothing left to put back together with tape or glue or nails—this is what is left.

  This space is endless. Nothing matters in this space. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Because nothing actually exists here. Everything is possible here, but nothing is certain here. There’s no telling how long this moment will last, but I want it forever. Forever and forever and then a little more forever. To feel this protected. An endless spot in time where our decisions and our actions are nonexistent. I share this space with no one and wouldn’t let anyone in if they came knocking. The anger and rage and presence of certain people in my life are all gone, leaving only a flat line of possibility.

  My memory is left intact, but emotion gutted. The memory of what was said that has brought me to this place is a trail in the woods, leading from the house to the dark, unknown destination beyond the house. The basement. Where Dad disappears. To watch all this take place. Spoken about. Preached about. Prayed about. To bring us all together is what it is about. The truth is that we all have things to say and whether we are right or wrong, we say them. We say things we believe and most often we’re wrong. And even if we’re right, we fight so hard at making someone believe we’re right, we become wrong. Words make us into monsters of ourselves.

  We wake up and we go to school or we go to work or we don’t work at all, and the truth is that we believe in the things that are told to us. How to dress and how to be. What to say and how to say it. Who to fuck and how to fight. That life exists with other lives. We slam into each other and share ourselves and we are chipped away.

  People tell other people that miracles are real and that miracles really happen and that God has a plan and that drugs are the key to a world of normalcy and are chipped away. I was climbing farther into the forest to protect myself from what was chasing me my whole life. Now it has all been set straight. Righted and final. I have no plans to return. I am marching.

  Marching, marching, marching.

  Things can never be any better than they are right now. Marching but frozen—both at once.

  But even as I have all of these thoughts, there comes a new realization, which crushes all beneath it, just as—I can feel it now, at last—Rembrandt’s skull is crushed by my bat: that nothing stays the same forever.

  EPILOGUE TO THE APOCALYPSE

  The grass on the football field is brown and the sky is an unbroken gray. The grass didn’t used to be brown and the sky didn’t used to be gray, but that’s how they are now. Soon the players will come rushing out, grunting and hitting, as they prepare for the annual Thanksgiving football game against an all-male, Christian rival. People keep count of how many Thanksgiving wins and how many Thanksgiving losses each school has had over the years. It’s something people care about. The Plaids care the most, it seems, as is evident in the formation of the Blue Jay Bandits—a group of shirtless Byron Hall crazies who coat their faces and chests in blue war paint, bang cowbells, and blast air horns at football games.

  Father Vincent and I are sitting on the top bench of the bleachers, watching assistant coaches mark the field with orange cones.

  “You know, you never did tell me your five codes,” Father Vincent says.

  “Five simple codes to survive the Zombie Apocalypse,” I say.

  Father Vincent retrieves a booklet and baby pencil from his black sport coat. Not the blood moon one I saw before. This one is gold and green.
r />   “Different cover,” I say.

  “Cornfields by my house when I was a kid,” he says. “When I use up all the pages of a notebook, I transfer the unfinished tasks to the next one.”

  “And my five codes are an unfinished task.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are priests allowed to write down things they hear in confession?”

  “Probably not,” he says. He returns the notepad to his pocket. He’s got on his God Squad uniform—black pants, black shirt, little white collar in the front. “I still want to hear them, if you want to share.”

  “Do you know how to tie a tie, Father?”

  “Neckties are not standard issue for God’s troops, my son.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed. It’s okay if you can’t tie a necktie.”

  “Maybe you can teach me.” He checks his watch. “But some other day. I have to get over to the theater soon. We’re running a final dress rehearsal with tech, makeup, wardrobe, the works.” He unwraps a stick of gum and slumps back against the row behind us. “I miss the Spirit Committee.” He pauses. “Do you think you can make the preview tonight?”

  “Unlikely,” I say. “I can’t go to the bathroom without at least a dozen people signing a notarized affidavit, stipulating the date, time, location, and duration of my visit.”

  The blue side doors to the school swing open and slam against the wall. Kids push past each other. They kick and punch and sometimes exchange intricate handshakes.

  “Maybe I can speak to Phil and Nancy. Make a formal request. See if they’ll break the court’s rules this once.”

  “No,” I say. “Please don’t.”

  “I can be awfully persuading when I dress like this.”

  “Everyone wants to talk to Phil and Nancy. After our weekly sessions, my court-appointed family therapist asks Phil and Nancy how I’m adjusting. My teachers mail my grades and progress reports home to Phil and Nancy. The State of Maryland pays money every month to Phil and Nancy, to cover my cost of living, my expenses. Detectives, police—they ask Phil and Nancy to talk to me about everything and see if I remember anything new. Baltimore City Clerk’s Office for Family Court. The office of Judge Michael Thomas Antrum. My mother’s addiction specialists. All of the lawyers because we all have lawyers.”

  Football players jog out among the cones, helmets in hand, past some Blue Jay Bandits, fully clothed in their standard plaid attire, Cam and a few others. Soccer season ended last week. Our guys didn’t make it past regionals. So they hang out at football practice now, shouting insults or squeezing off an occasional airhorn blast.

  The players pull on their helmets and run drills, keeping focus—tap dancing through a hopscotch made out of string, pushing a metal bleacher around the field with their taped hands, fighting their way out from inside a circle of angry men hellbent on knocking the football loose from his hands. Coaches sound their whistles, regularly, walking among the players, while Mr. Vo observes. He wears a tweed top coat, black leather gloves, and a bright blue scarf wrapped around his neck. Young men tackle young men on cue. Tiny silver clouds puff from their mouths.

  After that night, my life took a turn.

  No one believed me, for one thing. No one wanted to hear what I did to Mr. Rembrandt with the baseball bat. No one trusts the son of a handless man. There’s nothing we can do to help him—he’s Ballentine’s boy. This is what I imagine former family friends and neighbors say about me now.

  The day after Dad had his hand cut off the detectives took me back to Tiller Drive to find the house. We did and it was empty, spotless, gone. I knew it would be. It looked like no one had ever been there and nothing had ever happened at all.

  Mr. Rembrandt stopped coming to school. More rumors flooded the halls about him but nothing remotely close to the truth. I don’t know if I killed him or not. The funny thing is—I don’t expect to see him again. I’m not sure why, but I don’t think I will. Gut feeling. Perhaps I just don’t want to think about it—about what I would do or fail to do, if I saw him again.

  Dad was released from Johns Hopkins into the psychiatric facilities at Sheppard Pratt in Towson. He’s been on suicide watch and in isolation since it happened. His lawyers say that he’s being well-cared for, but I haven’t seen him or heard from him myself. All I know is that he’s alive, which I guess is a good thing considering.

  After Mom found out about Dad, she left Zeke and disappeared for almost a month. I found out in family court that a security officer George found her in one of the empty units of The Prince Edward. She’d been living in a plastic apartment and doing her dope. She’s back with Zeke and Zeke tells me that she shoots her morphine now. I see her in custody court sometimes. She’s far from well.

  Jackson moved out of his apartment in Fell’s Point and lives with one of his coozy girlfriends somewhere downtown between the Inner Harbor and Tiller Drive. He ran out of money when Dad went away. Jackson calls me when he has time. When he thinks of it. Usually a voicemail. He calls me Stumps, and then goes silent until the message runs out of space.

  Tricia took care of Dog without me even having to ask. She saw all the drama and took it upon herself to make Dog a permanent part of her family. Dog and her fat little dog, Travis. I saw her the last time I was at the house. She asked if I wanted to see her, and I said not this time. She made me promise to come back and visit. I said that I would, but I think she knew I wasn’t coming back.

  Phil and Nancy Weber live in a ranch-style house an hour outside the city. They don’t have any kids of their own. It was just me at first, but starting last week they added an eleven-year-old. His name is Matthew and he goes to public school. We share a room with all of the basics. No bunk beds like in the movies. Twin beds, each with our own nightstand, reading lamp, trunk for our clothes, and a closet we share. I gave Matt my half. He likes to hang up his T-shirts. He doesn’t like them folded. I’m fine with the trunk.

  The Webers don’t watch a lot of TV or movies. He is a loan officer at a local bank and she is a real estate clerk for a law firm. They subscribe to more newspapers than magazines and have a garage where they park their used cars and store their tools and lawn furniture and Christmas decorations. A two car garage like a normal American family. No basement.

  A yellow school bus picks Matt up every morning outside of the Webers’ house. I wait with him. He never says much. Nancy then drives me to school since she works downtown. The only thing left over from before is the chopography. Little Men. It’s hung above my bed.

  “So let’s hear your codes.”

  “I don’t remember them.”

  “Is that so?”

  I tap my forehead. “All gone, Father. Poof.”

  He offers me a stick of gum. I thank him, but I put it in my pocket.

  “The Webers—they’re only temporary,” he says. “Until things change.”

  “Do you know what they call me?” I ask. “The students?”

  He watches me. He doesn’t say anything.

  “Monster,” I say. “Not a monster. Not the monster. Just monster.”

  When I first moved in with the Webers I found an unread copy of Notes from Underground in their living room library of historical fiction and political biographies. Nancy apologized, knowing my connection to the book, but didn’t know where it had come from. Phil didn’t even know who Dostoevsky was, spending more time trying to pronounce the name than searching his memory of ever owning it. This and Little Men and zombie movies are all that remain for me. My inheritance. So I read it.

  The football team stands together on the field, facing Mr. Vo, an army before their leader. They are silent, awaiting instruction. An assistant coach holds a whistle in his mouth, taking cues from Mr. Vo via subtle nods, before piercing the air. After the whistle, he shouts out the word left or right. Players slap their helmets hard with both hands open, pivot in that direction, keep pace with one another—a single unified force—while running in place as quickly as possible.

  Af
ter a dozen pivots, instead of a direction, Mr. Vo shouts to the young men.

  “St. John Baptist De La Salle.”

  “Pray for us.”

  “Live Jesus in our hearts.”

  “Forever.”

  “One more time. St. John Baptist De La Salle.”

  “Pray for us.”

  “Live Jesus in our hearts.”

  “Forever.”

  A description comes to mind from the text of that night, like it had been written back then, but about today. Not a literal description, but more to the center of things. Deeper underground.

  I ran out into the street. It was a still night and the snow was coming down in masses and falling almost perpendicularly, covering the pavement and the empty street as though with a pillow. There was no one in the street, no sound was to be heard. The street lamps gave a disconsolate and useless glimmer. I ran to the cross-roads and stopped short. I stood in the snow, gazing into the troubled darkness.

  In another light, this could have been a winterland Zombie Apocalypse—the only thing missing, the undead. Undead Notes from Underground.

  Off in the distance, at the bus stop, I can see Mykel. He’s wearing a big winter coat and a new era Orioles’ baseball hat with the giant orange O’s emblem on the front, taking photos as usual, though I can’t tell of what. A car pulls into the bus lane and the passenger door opens. Mykel gets in and slams it. Zink signals and pulls out into traffic. I would never have expected them to be carpool brothers, but there it is, plain as day. Swagger.

  “Miracles,” Father Vincent says. “They do exist. I promise you, they do.”

  “I had a dream once about a miracle,” I say. “Everything stopped. Time was frozen. But I was marching. And for all eternity nothing could ever change from the way it was at that one frozen moment.”

  Father Vincent looks at me, waiting to see if I’ve got more to say. But I don’t. And before he can figure out how to respond, an air horn strikes the sky. It’s one of the Bandits, the guy sitting next to Cam, announcing the presence of a girl.