The Making of Zombie Wars (23 page)

The waiter spilled water all over the table while topping up Billy's glass and then dropped a bundle of dirty chopsticks, which danced on the floor. Billy and Joshua were the only patrons in the restaurant, perhaps the last ones before it closed its doors for good and released its indentured staff to pursue greener tea pastures. The waiter kicked the chopsticks out of sight, under some other table, into some undetermined future.

“I'll be honest with you, Joshie: I need you like I need a broken broom handle up my ass. I got so many clients I'm gonna have to start offing them. Why? Because nobody believes in my people more than I do. Every artist has to believe in himself. Yes, of course! It's a clich
é
. But what happens when it feels like all your belief is drained away? When there's nothing left in the tank? This is where I come in: I believe in you! I'm like a Swiss bank of belief. I keep it forever.”

He was mopping the water around his glass with a napkin.

“See that waiter? He'll never make it in the world of waiting. Why? Because nobody believes in him. Do you think his boss believes in him? Do you believe in him? I don't.”

Joshua looked at the waiter. He was there, so he was believable. To Joshua it seemed that the waiter's biggest problem was plain, mind-crushing low-wage boredom: the pain in the calves, the same demanding assholes, the same Muzak loop, the same orders, over and over again. Meanwhile, elsewhere, everywhere, the world unfurled like a flag. The basic task in everyone's life was pretending it was more than mere survival.

“I know what you're thinking, Josh: Why would George believe in me—in me, in this fledgling novice? Why would George want to waste his resources on a client with another zombie idea when all the film crews in the world could spend the next bazillion years shooting only the optioned zombie scripts? Well, Josh, I'll be honest with you.”

Billy deferred being honest for a long moment, his gaze fixated on Joshua, who asked the obvious question: “Who's George?”

“I'm George,” Billy said.

“I thought you were Billy.”

“George for clients, Billy for friends.”

“Why?”

“This business, Josh, is a bitch. Let me worry about all that. There is no I in
team
.”

“But there is
am
,” Joshua observed.

“What's that?”

“There is
am
. As in I
am
. T-E-
am
. The subject is implied in the verb.”

If it hadn't been for the Muzak molasses dripping from the speakers at the bar, they would've been sunk in uncomfortable silence.

“Joshie, I like you,” Billy/George said, his face clouding, “but you don't even know that you don't know what you're talking about.”

It was clear there was no hope available here. The pitching practice was now over, it was time to return to the dugout. And for the first time, Joshua thought of himself as a man who knew something others didn't: he knew Ana; he knew his father's cancer; he knew the little man in the crawl space. What he knew about all that exactly he didn't know, but he felt the weight of knowledge in his head and muscles; the door opened, and he was stepping in.

“I tell you what: this is obviously not gonna work out,” Billy/George said. “But I like you, and Graham is a buddy of mine, so I'll give you some free advice. First, get yourself in the writers' room, work your way up from there. They're shooting shitloads of TV in Chicago now, because we're far more real than LA. Send around some samples, after you clean them up first. There's lot of passive in there, a lot of college-level wrylies. And a lot of expensive set pieces. You amateurs shoot the movie in your head. An extra shot of espresso and galaxies collide. But get your first job, then get another one, and then a worse one, and before you know it, you'll be writing for Michael Bay.”

“Who's Michael Bay?”

“Who's Michael Bay!? Did you really just ask me that?”

Billy/George put his hand on his chest to affect surprise. He had an amethyst pinky ring. Joshua should've felt disappointment, but he felt instead like having won a contest: Billy/George was more desperate/deluded than him; Joshua's experience now equipped him to see it clearly. The waiter put the check in front of Billy/George, who pushed it over to Joshua without looking at it.

“He just asked me who Michael Bay was,” he said to the waiter, or to himself, or to anyone willing to be appalled at the ignorance.

“Who's Michael Bay?” the waiter asked.

“Who's Michael Bay!?” Billy/George clutched his head in exhibitionist disbelief. “Let's just say he owns an island.”

I know what I know, Joshua thought. I can do it, whatever
it
is. He had the weight; he was acquainted with the real people; he had things to say and impart. He was a screenwriter, even if he had nothing to show for it. Fuck Billy and George and the whole lot of them! And more than anyone else, fuck Bega!

There was no way he wasn't going to the workshop tonight.

*   *   *

Hence he took up an afternoon residency at the Coffee Shoppe and, fueled by a sequence of galactic-collision-grade cappuccinos, cranked out an entirely new scene, and then another one, and, then, another one. For the first time in a long while, he could perceive the far beacon of a finished script, the end of
Zombie Wars
, beyond which the lights of his better self shyly flickered.

He advanced to Graham's straight from the Coffee Shoppe and landed on the futon not even glancing at Bega, who was the only one already in the living room, reading the newspapers spread on the desk. His ensemble today featured a T-shirt reading
Sarajevo
in the shape of the Coca-Cola logo. He had an orange in his hands, which he, for some reason, kept kissing. The smacking sound annoyed Joshua so much that he kept moving his tongue along his teeth, like a gum-bleeding boxer, which consequently invoked Ana's lips and all that followed. But he managed to get invested in setting up his computer and be conspicuously busy with appearing to be busy.

“I am very sorry about whole thing,” Bega said, without looking up from the papers.

“What thing is that?” Joshua snapped.

“Cat.”

“Fuck you!”

“What can I tell you? Sorry.”

“It was my girlfriend's cat. She loved him. He was her best friend.”

Kimmy was no longer his girlfriend, nor would she ever again be one, but the lie gave him no pleasure. Bega kissed the orange once more, then started peeling it with his teeth, spitting the fragments onto the unread page. What was he going to do with the peel? Joshua hoped he'd drop it on the floor for Graham to see and then dress him down for foreign littering.

“How did you explain cat to her? Just curious,” Bega said, dropping the peel into a bin at his feet. There was even a box of tissues on the desk, so that he broke the orange up into wedges and lined them up on the paper. “You can tell her he attacked you and you had to kill him.”

“Go to hell,” Joshua said.

“I'm joking. I'm really sorry about cat.”

“And what about Stagger?”

“Who's Stagger?”

“Your killer friend broke Stagger's arm, kicked him in the head. I had to take him to the hospital. He'll never be the same again.”

It was hard to imagine Stagger's life being any different than it was—it was somehow unruinable, his insanity its armor. The phone in Joshua's pocket, pressed serendipitously against his testicles, buzzed and vibrated pleasantly, indicating a text message.

“That Stagger. Well, it was fair fight.”

“Fair? Please don't talk to me anymore.”

“Okay. No talking.”

Wedge by wedge, Bega devoured the orange, then dropped the peel in the bin. Motherfucker! Joshua thought.

“Hey, listen to what your friend Rumsfeld said,” Bega offered, but Joshua showed no sign he'd heard him. Instead he pulled up the
Zombie Wars
file and it came up to conceal his screen wallpaper: a shot of the newscaster in
Night of the Living Dead
failing to explain the cataclysmic developments. He set out to read through one of his freshly written scenes, scanning for wrylies, wondering where Graham was. His cheek hurt, feeling swollen. The room smelled of Bega's orange as he read from the papers:

“‘There is among the Iraqi people a respect for the care and the precision that went into that bombing campaign. It was not a long air campaign. It didn't last for weeks. And there was minimal collateral damage—unintended damage.' That is beautiful! Rumsfeld is genius! You should be thankful too, Joshua. Just one fat cat is minimal collateral damage.”

Bega's pronouncing words with his Bosnian accent—
bombing
as “bomBing,”
damage
as “damach”—made Joshua even more annoyed.

“Fuck you,” Joshua said. “You know nothing. Not about the cat, not about me, not about this fucking country.”

“What I know is that you had sex with Esko's wife.”

“I thought you were my friend. You brought a killer into my home.”

“It's Kimmy's home.”

“We split the rent. And it's none of your business anyway.”

“Nobody was killed. You must have respect for care and precision.”

“Go fuck yourself!”

“I thought that I must be there to protect you if Esko goes real crazy. You don't know him. He could've break your neck just like that.”

“Could've broken my neck,” Joshua said gleefully.

“Broken your neck,” Bega said. “You don't want to be alone with Esko, believe you me.”

“Thanks for saving my life, then!” Joshua said. His phone buzzed, but he ignored it, immersed in a vision of punching Bega's face in, complete with the sound of his cheekbones cracking. Unleashing a few extra voracious zombies to rip the flesh off his bones could be pretty enjoyable too.

“Are Ana and Alma with Kimmy now?” Bega asked.

“Even if they were, I wouldn't tell you. And they're not at my place either.”

“Esko's taking the whole thing hard. Drinking, a lot, talking to himself. He can get ideas, you know.”

“Why don't you just leave me alone and take care of your terrorist friend instead?”

“I understand you're angry. I'm there for you.”

“I'm here for you.”

“What?”

“You say: I'm here for you. Not: I'm there for you.”

“I'm here for you,” Bega said.

“Well, get the fuck out of here,” Joshua said.

Dillon walked in and took the far end of the sofa, inserting his presence between the two of them. “I just saw the craziest thing,” he pronounced.

But neither Joshua nor Bega showed any interest in the craziest thing. Graham entered, threw down his papers, and dropped in his chair. All of the splotches on his forehead stood united in one solidly red front.

“If any of you utter the words
weapons of mass destruction
,” Graham said, “I am going to projectile vomit directly in your face.”

“I just saw the craziest thing,” Dillon repeated for Graham's benefit, but he ignored him as well. Joshua's phone vibrated, yet again. There was a time when the phone was not embedded in you, the time when you could be alone with the people you were with. And when there was no one around, you could be by yourself, with yourself. Now your spiderweb was always being tugged.

Alice emerged from the bathroom and smiled angelically at everyone, her hairdo perfectly blown dry. It'd been a while since she'd been at the workshop. She was in her pudgy forties, with a moony face and saucer eyes, which Joshua did not find pretty but, rather, comforting to look at, like a cloud in a perfectly blue sky. Last time he'd seen her, he'd imagined himself curling up in her arms.

“Good evening, gentlemen!” she said.

“I just saw the craziest thing,” Dillon tried again, and, mercifully, Alice said: “And what did you see, Dillon?”

“I saw this dog with like wheels instead of his hind legs.”

“That's amazing,” Alice said and smiled at Dillon, who fidgeted with the pleasure of her attention.

“It was like half dog, half skateboard,” he said.

*   *   *

Joshua read from his computer screen, enunciating every word carefully, as if auditioning:

“Ruth opens the cage door and walks in. The boy lies still, facedown. She kneels next to him and rolls him over. His eyes are closed, he looks peaceful, as opposed to the tormented zombie face he wore before. Suddenly, his eyes open.”

Alice gasped.

She was in the middle of a spiritual self-liberation journey, working on a script about an Idaho woman who lived in the same shack for forty-seven years, communing with angels every day. “True story,” she'd said. “She once even went to heaven and sat at God's throne.” Alice could see this scene in her head: the throne of gold; the divine light around it; angels prancing everywhere; and there was Candy, fresh from the shack to rub elbows with the Lord. “That's going to be expensive,” Graham had said. “A godless set is considerably cheaper.”

“Ruth takes the boy in her arms and strokes his long hair lovingly,” Joshua continued. “Feebly, he smiles. Wounds on his face are now slowly bleeding. He raises his hand with some effort and touches the woman's hair. She smiles at him. Boy groans. She sits him up. Boy: ‘I'm hungry.'”

Joshua looked up. No one said anything. Graham gestured toward the others to suggest an offering of comments. Bega conspicuously sucked on an unlit cigarette.

“That's pretty good,” Bega said. “Better than before.”

“I really like that she like risks her life by like going into the cage,” Dillon said.

“I think that's beautiful,” Alice said.

“But the boy was dead, no?” Graham said.