The Making of Zombie Wars (11 page)

Bernie honked from his ferry-sized white Cadillac. In addition to the glaring absence of sun, Bernie's shades were not age-appropriate at all: the frames were too narrow for his sagging face; there was fake-diamond glitter on the sides; and the lenses were far too dark even for a bright summer day, suggesting glaucoma rather than senior coolness. The shades were most likely Constance's present, just like the flannel shirt he was wearing with his sleeves rolled up, like a campaigning congressman feigning to be the American people. Constance bought things for Bernie Levin that made him appear younger (a razor-looking cell phone, many-geared bicycle, surfboard), thereby constantly setting up Bern (as she called him) for some kind of age-based failure. The next thing on her list was a spiffy car. She wanted him to get something smaller and sportier than his enormous Cadillac, which Joshua was presently entering and which would've smelled like a pine-scented taxicab if it wasn't for the reek of Bernie's rampant paradentosis.

“Where are we going?” Joshua asked testily. Once he'd watched a nature documentary in which young chimps would strut around the uninterested older males making contemptuous chimp faces; and then, one day, they would dare for the first time to smack the elders.

“I don't know,” his father said. “Aren't we having lunch?”

“It's too early,” Joshua said.

“It's never too early for being too late.”

Joshua was no strutting chimp, but Bernie annoyed him simply for doing what aged fathers did: asking
Where are you?
as soon as Joshua picked up, still confounded by the concept of the cell phone; always worrying about money, ever a Holocaust descendant; celebrating his Jewish heritage by imparting incomprehensible stories about obscure relatives; driving like a terrified lunatic, flying over speed bumps, hitting the brakes arbitrarily; insisting that he wasn't as old as he was, even if he was nowhere near as young as Connie wanted him to be. And then there were the anthological non sequiturs, whose frequency kept increasing since he'd retired and sold his dental office. The previous time Joshua had seen him, just before he took off for the cruise, Bernie proclaimed—over dinner, out of the blue, Connie squeezing his hand as if to show her forgiveness and understanding for his dementia—“the future of the world is in a bag of dog poop, because that's where the bacteria that can eat plastic will evolve.” After he'd retired into a life of magazine subscriptions and cruises, he had more than enough time to think inconsequentially. It's never too early for being too late? What the hell did that mean?

“I've got to go to my screenwriting workshop later,” Joshua said.

“You'll be fine,” Bernie said. “Let's go to the lake.”

Whereupon he made a U-turn right in the middle of Broadway, cars honking furiously in their wake.

“How's your movie stuff going?” Bernie asked. He didn't really want to know, as he didn't really care.
Your movie stuff
meant that, as far as he was concerned, it was all just plain indulgent.

“Swimmingly.”

“What are you working on now?”

All that screenwriting and film business was, as Bernie had once eloquently put it, “smoke up the ass.” It certainly didn't help that Joshua never sold anything, never earned a dime with his writing; nor did it help that, for Bernie, Saul Bellow was the be all and end all of narrative art, truer than the truth itself, pretty close to displacing Moses as the greatest Jew of all time. Not least because Bernie had met him more than once at various dinner parties.

“It's called
Zombie Wars
,” Joshua said, spitefully.

Bernie made another turn and now they were driving down the parking lot along the lake; the expanse of the Wilson Street beach opened up in the distance like a prairie. He kept tapping on the brake as if it were a bass-drum pedal, so that they kept lurching forward. There was nobody around, except for an occasional man sitting alone in a car. Joshua knew it was a daytime pick-up spot for cruising men, but he didn't mention it to Bernie, sure he'd have no idea. Bernie parked two spots down from a man who tried to make eye contact to determine if he was going to get lucky with a threesome. The man looked exactly like Dick Cheney: pale and bald, egg-shaped head, rimless glasses, the detached gaze of a sociopath.

“What's it about?” Bernie asked. Another annoying thing: relentless questions. He never let Joshua be silent, quick to counter his reticence with an onslaught of inquiries. It was love, but maddening still. It was also fear of being left out of his children's lives: it had started after the divorce, after the routine of biweekly visits with him had been established. The waves crested far out on the lake and kept coming; the Wilson Street beach was desolate, except for a silhouette throwing something to a very speedy dog, maybe a greyhound.

“It's about zombies. And wars,” Joshua said.

“Let me ask you a question: how do they turn into zombies? Medically speaking. That's never been clear to me.”

“In my script they're infected with a virus.”

“What virus?”

“It's a virus, it doesn't have a name. It's a zombie virus.”

“Okay. But if you know it's a virus, shouldn't you have a name for it? You know, something like H1Z3 or something.”

“It's called zombie virus.”

“Zombie virus. I get it.”

The water was brown-gray; the mud at its bottom had been disturbed. For Chicago, the lake was merely decoration: nobody lived on it or off it; if it somehow were drained, the city would just pave it for parking all the way to Michigan. Script Idea #79:
A brutal storm releases a sunken sailboat from the bottom of the lake, and the body of a young man is found. Nobody in the small town knows who it is, as no one has been missing. Who was he? What happened to him?

The moment of quiet was evanescent, as Bernie was whipping up more questions in his head. Like all senescent Republicans, Levin the elder believed in leadership, which started with identifying the essence of the problem.

“But where does it come from, that virus? From a cat scratch? Or are there monkey zombies? Or bird zombies? Did the virus jump species?”

A car pulled up next to Cheney's. The man in it was young, wearing a suit, blond as Hitlerjugend. He and Cheney rolled down their windows, conducted their negotiations, and were gone in a blink. A little bit of lunchtime dicksucking never hurt nobody. Joshua envied the ease with which homosexuals arrived at their common interest in sex. The sad fact of life was that there were no cruising spots for heterosexual men. If there were, Joshua would be parked somewhere every day of his life, willing to sleep with any woman generous enough to pull up alongside him.

“Maybe it's not a virus, but some kind of cancer,” Bernie said. “I'm just thinking aloud.”

“Let's not think,” Joshua hissed. “Let's go to Charlie's Ale House. I'm hungry.”

Charlie's Ale House was a long way away, with a lot of stop signs for Bernie to force the Cadillac into a great leap forward. The way he leaned into the steering wheel, the way he looked over it, as if over the fence—it just drove Joshua crazy. People honked at them from behind at every traffic light. And then, for reasons unknown, Bernie took the residential streets, quaint and porchy and lousy with speed bumps, riding them like waves. Joshua was getting nauseated.

“Your grandfather had a cousin back in Bukovina,” Bernie said.

Goddamn, Joshua thought.

“Chaim was his name, I believe, and one day he stopped believing in God. The family saw that something was wrong, they took him to the rabbi. The rabbi took one look at Chaim and said: ‘My child, you will not die until you regain your faith.' So he kept not believing. Once he was drowning and people jumped in to help him and he yelled: ‘I'm fine! I'm fine! I don't believe in God.' And he swam to the shore.”

It took him a few times to park right in front of Charlie's, never interrupting his narration, bumping into the car behind.

“Then the Germans rounded up everyone in the village, crammed them in a house to burn them all alive. But he ran out of the burning house, screaming: ‘I don't believe in God! I don't believe in God!' He lived, everyone else died.”

Joshua was unbuckled, ready to get out, but there was no getting out until the story was over. He watched Bernie's eyebrows—two pointy tufts of hair—as they oscillated in harmony with his narrative excitement.

“So then after the war he made it to Israel and there he had a family and then a stroke, so went into a coma. But he couldn't die. He could be still alive, for all I know. He might stay comatose forever. God is patient.”

“Nice story,” Joshua said. “What's your point?”

“Maybe it's not the virus. Maybe it's that zombies lost faith.”

“You are something, Bernie!” Joshua said. “Zombies are self-hating Jews? If you don't stand with Israel, you are one of the living dead? Is that what you're saying?”

Bernie shrugged in the manner that was part of his annoying repertoire: slanting his head to the side, scrunching his shoulders, his face signaling,
Maybe I know nothing, but I'm just saying
—the shtetl shrug.

“It's just a virus, all right?” Joshua said. “It's a convention. Suspension of disbelief. Those who care about the story accept that it's a virus, they don't question the goddamn virus. It's like these weapons of mass destruction—Saddam has them because he's Saddam. If there are zombies there is a virus. The zombie virus. That's it. Can we drop the fucking virus?”

*   *   *

Bernie read the menu, squinting—another annoying thing—and moving his glasses up and down his curled-up nose to zoom in and out. Joshua knew that what he hated about the moments like this would end up being precisely what he missed about his father when he was gone—his irritating tics would be converted into heart-wrenching recollections. For instance, Bernie liked to announce his nutritional choices, as though everybody was on the edge of their seats to find out whether he intended to take salad or not.

“I'll have some soup,” he informed Joshua. “And also lamb. What are you going to have?”

“I don't know yet,” Joshua said. “I misplaced my wallet. So you're buying.”

“Okay, I'm buying, no problem. Get whatever you want,” Bernie said. “Have a steak if you want. Two steaks. You're pale. You look like a zombie.”

The cute, big-eyed waitress was working today—her name tag read Kelly—and just her twinklesome smile was worth the lengthy digestion of the slop available at Charlie's Ale House. As Joshua watched her walk over to them, he tried to think of some clever, flirtatious thing to say to her. But she was far too fast a walker, and when she pulled out her notepad, he just ordered a glass of ros
é
and a grilled cheese, while his father ordered soup (with extra crackers), lamb (rare), salad, and bread pudding. On the TV above the bar, there was Bush the beady-eyed president, ever stuck in the middle of incomprehension. Cheney, fresh from cocksucking, stood right next to him like a maleficent stepfather.

“How was the cruise?” Joshua asked.

“Israel really is a promised land,” he said. Normally, Bernie looked bronze after returning from a cruise, but today he looked waxy.

“Did you stop anywhere else?”

“Oh, some sunny islands. I wasn't feeling too well until we got to Haifa. Constance loved it!”

“And how's Constance?”

“Great! Her boobs grow with age,” Bernie said, shaking his head in appalling admiration. “When she's in the double Ds, I'll be double dead.”

Kelly brought soup and Bernie emptied five little bags of crackers into the bowl. Will I be like this when I grow old? Joshua wondered. Will I turn into a man who eats as if hurrying to finish before the food is snatched away? Bernie cradled the bowl with his left hand, looming over it. He learned that from his parents, it was a habit they'd acquired in the camp. You had to eat quickly and there was no talking while food was being disposed of. Bernie slurped a few spoonfuls, but then stopped to clear his throat, as if about to say something important.

“How's your mother?” he inquired.

“She seems fine,” Joshua said. “She asked about you too.”

“Did you tell her Connie and I went on a cruise?”

“She knew. She was hoping you were cruising on the
Titanic
.”

Bernie chortled: “A funny girl, she is, your mother.”

Kelly brought the rest of their lunch on a big tray, holding it high, so Joshua could see her nicely shaped biceps. Now that the food had arrived, the conversation was over for a while: Bernie cut into the lamb and it bled. Joshua watched Kelly swing her hips, slipping with ease between chairs, turning to push the kitchen door with her back. Women's presence in the world, Joshua realized, reliably provided torment for him, for his fatigued, unyielding flesh. He couldn't eat; he just sipped his ros
é
, far too dry, watching Bernie torture his undead meat. Normally, his father looked down on the plate while eating, as if any eye contact would slow down his chewing, his fists clenched around the knife and fork on either side of the plate, never letting them down. But this time he moved his jaw fitfully, glancing up at Joshua only to return his gaze to the lamb, presently swimming in its own blood. He stabbed a green bean, brought it to his mouth but didn't take it. A single tear snowballed down his left cheek.

“Oh, man!” Joshua whimpered. He hadn't anticipated this; this was supposed to be a routine Monday lunch with his father. “What is it now?”

“I don't feel well,” his father said. “I haven't been feeling well.”

Joshua had once watched Bush the Elder address the nation from the Oval Office. He was about to send our troops to some godforsaken place and highfalutin drivel was required to placate further the already indifferent American people. He was front-lit, the better to deliver the platitudes, so the Oval Office window behind him looked unreal, like a painted set. But then, in the middle of presidential bullshit, Joshua sensed a slight motion behind Bush and spotted a tree leaf falling, twirling through the frame of the backdrop window, which hence became real. The deciduous leaf suddenly made Bush look terribly old, and getting older by the instant. Mr. President was going to die and no troop deployment could ever stop that.