The Making of Zombie Wars (19 page)

“He must have run after a squirrel or something,” Stagger said.

“Please stay out of this, Mr. Stagger,” Kimmy said. “This is between my partner and me.”

Partner
, as if they were a law firm. Joshua moved up a couple more stairs and reached Kimmy's eye level. He foolishly considered kissing her cheek.

“Howdy, pardner,” she said, the ice in her voice stretching all the way to her own private Michigan. Her eyes were dark and—as they'd say in a novel—foreboding. “Your friends have stopped by to see you.”

 

 

INT. UNDERGROUND LAB — DAY

A desk lamp casts a narrow circle of light on the desk, where there is a syringe and a notebook. Major K is hunched at the desk, his head in his hands. He sits up, punches himself in the face.

MAJOR K

Do it, goddamn it! Be a man! You gotta do it!

Finally, he grabs the syringe and stares at it. He cleans with a wipe a spot on his forearm and plunges the needle into it, emptying the syringe. He pulls it out, carefully dismantles it, and disposes of it. He sits back and closes his eyes. His jaw is clenched to the point of breaking.

MOMENTS LATER

Major K opens his eyes, takes a pen, and opens his notebook. He writes the date at the top of the page.

INSERT

Major K's handwriting.

MAJOR K

(v.o.)

Muscular tension. Irregular breathing. Despair. Suicidal thoughts.

 

Joshua stepped into Kimmy's living room as into a furnished nightmare. Everything was overwhelmingly familiar yet disturbingly misarranged—the flowers in the vase appeared positively aggressive, the books on the coffee table growled at him—not least because Ana and her daughter were seated on Kimmy's sofa. Her face ashen and devoid of dimples, Ana kneaded her hands, wearing the white shirt with leg-of-mutton sleeves, minus the chocolate smudges. Her daughter (what was her name?) stood up to offer her hand to Joshua, as if welcoming him to a scheduled appointment.

“We have met once before, but you might not remember me,” she said. “My name is Alma.”

Joshua shook her hand—firm and confident—but he couldn't muster any words.
You kids have fun
, she'd said to him at Ana's place before prancing off. Stagger extended his encased hand and they exchanged warm, nearly conspiratorial smiles. Perhaps they knew each other. Nothing was beyond Stagger, or this day, or this nightmare. The Lord is a great plotter, the clever tormentor of the innocent. Ana didn't look up or say anything to Joshua, who was grateful for her restraint.

“Perhaps you'd care to tell Teacher Josh what brings you here,” Kimmy said. Ana rose and took a deep breath, Alma looking up at her, eager to hear her next line. Joshua set the New Balance bag on the table with a flower vase, as if preparing to be slapped around. Ana's eyes were a different, darker shade of green in the diffuse light of Kimmy's living room. Perhaps if they all remained silent for as long as possible, they'd slip out of this moment into the next one, and then the next one, until all the preceding moments were erased from memory and everything could start all over again. The ultimate American dream: the eternal present, where nothing has ever happened before what is happening now.

“This is what I've learned, Teacher Josh, while we were waiting for you to enrich us with your presence,” Kimmy said. “Her husband threw them out of their house. He said he no longer cared. He's done with being a stepfather and a spouse.”

Alma nodded, confirming the general outline of the unfolding catastrophe.

“A most complicated family situation, this. A plot worthy of a fat Russian novel,” Kimmy went on. “The trouble is I can't stand Russian novels.”

“They're not Russian,” Joshua offered. “They're Bosnian.”

“Whatever. They're strangers,” Kimmy said. “In my living room. In my home.”

A centrifuge of terror spun in his stomach. He couldn't have imagined that the fear booth could offer services like this. Neither the vase nor the flowers moved, nor were the coffee-table books in any way affected by what was transpiring. Joshua's mind was burning to reach a perfect state of blankness—he could be approaching satori, if it weren't for the mean little man in the crawl space, making notes, gloating: one day, when we're all dead and gone, this will be a page in a script.

He didn't like it that Kimmy's arms were crossed at her chest. It rendered her determined to inflict the most brutal punishment in abeyance of any forgiveness. Meanwhile, Stagger drifted toward the bookshelf and bent his neck to browse through the book spines. Joshua could learn a lot about the art of psychotic detachment from Stagger, who was rubbing his forehead presently, as if to stimulate a dormant thought. Kimmy was too self-possessed to be forgiving; ever confident she could tell right from wrong, she hated the wrong. Joshua really needed to sit down. Perhaps he could escape and join the marines, go to Iraq, lose his mind honorably. Become like Stagger, a man inoculated against suffering and sanity. Where was the samurai sword? In the laundry room, yes, he left it there. It might come in handy for a future hara-kiri.

“What do you think you should do here, Jo?” Kimmy asked. “'Coz I'm plain flummoxed.”

Everyone waited for him to say something. Everyone could see he was clean out of explanations or ideas. Whereas Kimmy was flummoxed. He did think that
flummoxed
was an odd word to use in this particular context.

“Why don't we all just sit down and talk it over,” Joshua said. “I'll try to explain.”

“Esko also said that we were now free to go and live with Teacher Josh,” Alma said. Somehow, she seemed blithely untroubled by all this. How early can you learn to stay out of your own life? To watch it as if it were taking place on the screen? Ana barked something in Bosnian at Alma but she ignored her with ease. Stagger grinned at some sinister book on the psychology-of-sex shelf.
Flummoxed
. What the fuck? Joshua clawed at his head, aware that his paralysis combined with his anxious gestures indicted him. When I find myself bound by death's ties, I call upon the Lord to make me completely catatonic. Coppola had once faked an epileptic seizure in a meeting with rapacious film executives. Joshua's mouth, however, was much too dry for foaming. Ana leapt up from the sofa toward Alma, as if to slap her, but the girl stepped back, disobediently and dexterously, to continue her testimony.

“He said that Teacher Josh can now feed and fuck us,” Alma said. “I beg your pardon: feed us and fuck
her
.”

“Please, stop!” Ana said.

“I'm just saying what your husband said.”

There was still a way to explain this into some acceptable shape: pathologically jealous husband plus excessively devout teacher equals terrible,
terrible
misunderstanding. Kimmy panned from Ana to him and back—like guilty children, the two of them conspicuously avoided eye contact. Why was it so difficult to dissemble? The one thing that parents need to give their children to increase their survival chances in this punishing world is the skill to lie blatantly and unflinchingly. Bernie was good at lying, like many a man of his age and generation; yet he failed to teach Joshua how to look a woman in the eye and deceive.

“I see,” Kimmy said. “Teacher Josh. Yes.”

“All I'm saying is I'm just saying,” Alma said. She sat down, evidently relieved to have contributed to the comprehensive unmasking. Teenagers should be rounded up and forcibly trained in lying; it should be part of the high school curriculum. We must learn to be concerned with the meaning of utterances, not with their truth. Script Idea #151:
Subterfuge Summer Camp, where everyone's a liar, except for one boy, who keeps getting punished for his suicidal honesty, providing a lesson for the rest. Title:
The Lies of Others.

Ana sat down on the sofa to fully dedicate herself to weeping. Joshua had never heard her crying; he'd never even imagined her crying—she was suddenly someone else, someone whose throat was convulsing as she emitted high-pitched yelps that couldn't be construed as anything other than hurt. Even Stagger looked up from the book he was flipping through—
Female Perversions
it was, too fittingly.

“Is there something you would like to say to me, Jo?” Kimmy asked. There was a time when Joshua's mother had often delivered the very same line, expecting little Josh to grovel apologetically. One day he'd had nothing to say, and he'd said it and it was poetry.

“That was not me,” Joshua said.

“What's that?”

“That wasn't me.”

“Try again.”

“Her husband was in the war in Bosnia,” Joshua tried again.

“Let's first agree on some facts: you had sex with his wife, who is also your student. Yes?”

“He was in Special Police.”

“Did you or did you not?”

The ice in her voice started cracking. Joshua wanted to grab her hands and bathe them in kisses, but he knew it wouldn't have been a prudent move. He said:

“I was trying to help.”

“Did you or did you not?”

“He did,” Alma said, and Ana, tears streaming down her cheeks, swung from the sofa to backhand Alma's biceps. There was going to be a bruise there.

“He's an extremely dangerous man,” Joshua said.

“Well, shall we call the police, then?” Kimmy said.

“No police!” Ana yelped.

“The police would deport us,” Alma said, holding her biceps. She had an Abercrombie and Fitch shirt, her hair gelled into a cool misshape. You could tell high school boys followed her around like lemmings.

“No worries. I'm not going to be the one to call the police,” Kimmy said. “You are now Teacher Josh's responsibility. He can now feed and fuck whoever he wants. Except for me. I'm out.”

Uninterested in the drama, what with all the pain murdered inside him, Stagger kept operating on the fringes: now he was reading postcards and notes on the fridge, including the smiley-sun Post-it Kimmy had left for Joshua. Stagger struggled to open the fridge with the hand in the cast, eschewing for some reason doing it with his left one.

“Actually, you know what? You, Teacher Josh, are out,” Kimmy said. “Yes. Get out.”

It was utterly amazing to Joshua that he was still standing and speaking, while his true and only self curled up on the filthy floor of his being to writhe like a fetus in a frying pan. The little man at the desk noted that down as well. Also, the beckoning hook above the table.

“Out!” Kimmy said.

Stagger finally succeeded in opening the fridge and clasping a bottle of beer. He was as indifferent as the vase and the flowers and the Lord.

“Do you have a bottle opener somewhere?” Stagger shouted from the kitchen.

*   *   *

Were this taking place in a movie, here would be a nice cut: all of them winced simultaneously as Kimiko ferociously slammed the door behind them. “This is crazy,” Stagger said, the beer bottle between his hands. He attempted to bite off the cap, but Alma took it from him and opened it with a cigarette lighter she magically pulled out of her pocket. Stagger high-fived her, impressed. They bonded in disengagement, in their absence from the moment.

“I'm sorry,” Ana said. There were many questions Joshua could have thought of asking her: Why in the world did you come to Kimiko's? Did you not understand that consensual sex is a completed transaction? Why didn't you mind your own business, stay away from mine? In this country everyone is constitutionally required to mind their own goddamn business. The way we do business here is mind our own. Otherwise, the social contract is as good as toilet paper.

“It's okay,” he said, disingenuously.

CUT TO: A fortress-sized SUV rolling into the frame.

It parked right in front of the house and Rachel and Janet emerged from it. Mom stopped in her tracks to stare at her son, unable to parse the foreign presences around him. Janet opened the trunk to get out a large pie, but before she closed it, she noticed Joshua and the incongruous others: half-naked Stagger with one hand in a cast and a beer in the other; a woman with smeared mascara; an Abercrombie-and-Fitched teenager.

“Rhubarb,” Janet proclaimed, pie in hand.

All stood motionless, contemplating the rhubarb pie. When I find myself flummoxed and bound by death's ties, and the agonies of the abyss something something, when I am wound up in misery and grief, please, Lord, let my ass slip free without serious repercussions.

“Are we not supposed to have dinner tonight with Kimiko and you?” Janet asked. “Did you not invite us? It was tonight, right, Rachel?”

“Tonight,” Mom confirmed.

“Fuck me,” Joshua said.

“Joshua!” Mom said.

“Where is your duffel bag?” Stagger asked.

“Please explain,” Janet said.

Joshua trawled his mind for something to say, something that would allow him to avoid explaining, but nothing came up.

“Now is not a good time,” he said.

“Now is the only time,” Janet insisted.

“You left your duffel bag back there, Jonjo,” Stagger said.

“We should probably get out of here,” Joshua suggested.

“What duffel bag?” Janet asked. “Who are these people? Why don't I know what's going on? I don't like this one bit.”

They all packed into the car but went nowhere, sitting in silence until the windows fogged up. Janet started the car and the heat, and turned to face Joshua and Ana in the backseat.
The Abasement of Joshua Levin
, by Yahweh Asshole.

“Okay, Jackie,” Janet said. Mom was facing him too. “What's up?”

“Jan…” Joshua whimpered. Why was it so hard to speak? Stagger was in the far backseat with Alma, who was eating the pie with her fingers, feeding some to him. She must be high, Joshua reckoned. That must be the bond.