The Making of Zombie Wars (14 page)

But Kimmy was not tranquilized at all: a bottle of dreadfully Chilean wine was on the dining-room table, a Bach cello suite droned on, a candle sputtered with lavender-scented flames, some dead animal smelled appetizingly from the oven. There was going to be a sharing of thoughts.

“I would like to talk to you, Jo,” Kimiko said, offering a place at the table as if it were a witness stand. She poured a full glass of wine for him and but a third for herself, and an arrow of fear whooshed into his chest to vibrate for a while: what if she was pregnant and about to announce it? She sat across from him; in the counterlight he could see the aura of her charged stray hairs. He'd begged Kimmy to let him watch her comb her long hair, but she never let him anywhere close to it, ever the empress of her domain.

“I've been thinking,” Kimmy said, “and wondering: how is it that I've never read any of your writing?”

Joshua swallowed half of his glass. Interesting: a touch of Chapstick, ginger-ale nose, cat-hair finish. He couldn't remember the last time he actually enjoyed wine. Perhaps his nose was changing; perhaps his body was changing; perhaps an evil cell had already hatched in his groin.

“Well,” he said. “I never thought you would care to see any of it. Most of it is not done anyway. Scripts change constantly. No living person has ever finished a script.”

The truth was that he was too embarrassed to show any of it to her, fearing that she—she who combed her hair in privacy, who wrangled little patients daily—would instantly recognize the nonsensical silliness of, say,
The Ship of Doom
, featuring a killer on the loose who boarded a cruise ship on its way to the Caribbean, only to be recognized by Honey, the widow of a policeman he'd killed. All that in the thirty pages he'd written before he, wisely, quit. He longed to impress her, to show her he could think
with
thinking.

“I'm not admonishing you,” Kimmy said. “I realize that we both need space. Which is okay. But I do care about what you do, about you.”

She used to be on the archery team in college; she'd once almost made it to the Olympics. She could tie her hair in a knot on the top of her head and would never notice as it unraveled. She ran half-marathons, for the hell of it; she could run marathons anytime she wanted to. He downed the rest of his wine. The door of the fear booth flew wide open.

“This situation,” Kimmy said, waving her hand as if everything around them indisputably constituted the
situation
, “might be a chance for us to take our relationship to a new level.”

The part of Joshua that wasn't cowed wanted to ask her whether cock rings and handcuffs were commonly deployed at the new level. But that exact part of him had just unleashed itself upon Ana and then spent time doubled over with severe arousal and then some extra time feeling guilty about it all. Bushy walked in and abruptly rolled on his back to oversee the negotiations from the floor.

Her lease was up next month, Kimmy said, and they could sign a new one together. They would split the rent and he would pay her back half of the deposit she had already put up and
this
—she made another demonstrative circle, and the wine swirled again inside her glass—would be the home they share. The whorling moves were wholly disorienting, as if she were working to mesmerize him.

He applied the tip of his forefinger to his lips in a gesture of serious contemplation, and he could still smell Ana's skin on it. Kimmy noticed his empty glass and positioned the mouth of the bottle over it for him to approve replenishment. Joshua admired her determination, her ability to be perpetually goal-oriented—she was everything he wasn't, a smart woman included. If there had been such a thing as a perfect self-betterment instruction sheet, she would have checked off every item on the list. She was one hairbreadth away from self-completion.

“I don't want anything to change,” she said. “I just want more of it.”

Joshua nodded, and she emptied the bottle into his glass. Whatever beast was in the oven now reached the early stages of incineration. He'd thought that she knew more than he simply from being less disorganized; he'd believed she must be seeing in him something he had no access to. Perhaps it was his inchoate quality that she liked—he was incomplete: a Joshua without Joshua, a thinker without thinking. But if she couldn't tell that he was drunk after he'd groped another woman, if she couldn't see the sludge of lechery at the bottom of his alcohol-red eyes, then she couldn't anticipate the forms he would assume upon completion. Which is to say that Ms. Perfect wasn't that perfect, and Joshua stood a reasonable chance. They could, then, perhaps, manage to move on to the next level in the relationship game, the cock ring set to be the transitional object this time around. He would have to be responsible and productive, she would have to be forgiving and understanding; they could keep their secrets and work on the practicalities of common life. Ana would remain obscure in the before, while in the after he and Kimmy would be progressing toward the peaceful domain of grown-up commitment, whose denizens regularly read the Sunday
New York Times
before a brunch with friends and, if need be, nursed each other through grueling chemo. Here was Joshua, then, at the mouth of the fear booth; he could back out or step in. He offered her his glass for a chin-chin and she touched it with hers.

Joshua followed Kimmy upstairs and put his wineglass on the nightstand. But he never got to drink any more of it, as she expertly handcuffed him to the bedposts, then got on top of him. She bit his nipples; she sucked him while she fingered him to tickle the prostate—hopefully liquidating the evil cell—stopping as soon as she interpreted Joshua's shudder as the harbinger of ejaculation; she ignored the handcuffs cutting into his wrists. She uttered no word; after she came, she closed her eyes and closed they stayed. Bushy, perversely contorted on the dresser, licked his own asshole throughout the whole session.

Script Idea #69:
An S&M male porn star falls in love with a gentle poetry professor. When she is kidnapped by his jealous fan, he needs not only to save her but also to tell her the truth about his life. It turns out she loves to dominate. Title:
These Chains of Love
.

 

 

EXT. NAVY PIER — NIGHT

Guarded by soldiers with night-vision goggles, a column of seven prisoners stumbles down the desolate Navy Pier. The prisoners' heads are covered with black hoods. Abandoned cruise ships, the Ferris wheel broken in half. The only sounds are the WAVES, the HOWLING of empty cruise ships, and WHIMPERING under the hoods. The soldiers have powerful guns but keep the prisoners in line with cattle prods, which cause sparks and make bodies twitch. They make them line up at the edge of the pier, facing the water. One of the prisoners tries to break away from the gang but is prodded back into line. Each of the soldiers points a gun at a hooded head.

PRISONER

(with a foreign accent)

I am not dead! I am not dead!

The soldiers fire. The flashing guns light up the exploding hoods.

SOLDIER

Now you are!

The soldiers chuckle as the bodies SPLASH in the water. On the horizon, smudges of dawn. All over downtown Chicago flicker the pyres incinerating zombie corpses.

 

The woman on the other side of Clark had Ana's shape, her gait. Joshua nearly got run over by a car as he crossed to enter her wake. He wasn't really sure it was Ana—the hair was different, undyed and longer—but he could still stand to watch the woman's hips swing: she wore a tight skirt and boots. If it was Ana, miraculously transformed, he'd cover her eyes with his hands from behind and make her guess the surpriser. But when the woman turned and exposed all her incontestable dissimilarities, Joshua, like an experienced stalker, slipped into the Coffee Shoppe. He needed some coffee, he decided retroactively.

Coffee in hand, he tried to sneak past Stagger's door, emblazoned with a
Cubs Fans Only
parking sign. But it flew open the moment the first stair creaked; a soundslide of Guns N' Roses washed over Joshua. Stagger emerged bare-chested, with sinews, bones, and muscles on full and elaborate display; his was the body of a junkie marathon runner. His ponytail was loosened so that his face was parenthesized by hair, streaked with gray here and there. He sported two shiny studs through his nipples, and, between them, a tattoo of a snake whose tail's tip touched his navel. No doubt somewhere within his domain he had a treasure chest full of cock rings and handcuffs, and many more things unimaginable. Joshua unhurriedly ascended onto the next creaking step. He was scared of Stagger and his nipple-studded intensity, but he didn't want to look like a coward and run up.

“Would you care to come in?” Stagger said, in a voice that only he could've thought alluring. “We could hang out, suck on, you know, some beer.”

“Come on, Stagger,” Joshua said, not looking at Stagger. “Jesus!”

“Leave Jesus out of this,” Stagger said. “I ask you respectfully.” He stepped back heels first into his dark den and closed the door. Relieved, Joshua proceeded upstairs through a tide of creaks, listening to what sounded like bottles being smashed to the beat of “Paradise City.” What was troubling was not so much the noise as that Stagger kept going. How many bottles for smashing could he possibly have in that place? Every little castle in the kingdom of Chicagoland includes a TV, fridge, and stacked crates of refined insanity.

Joshua's back was tense, his loins elongated to the point of pain, his shoulders painful from the burden of the last couple of days. A sensation of a noose around his neck, stretching it, providing relief as he hung from the ceiling, emerged in his mind. He looked up to see if there was a hook above the stairs where a belt could be attached, but there was none.

His place was exactly as he'd left it: mouse-gray dust clumps patrolling the corners; the piss-sticky bathroom floor; the hunt picture slanted, the fox heading downhill. The books stood on the shelves; the two chairs facing the table like reprimanded children; the unwashed cereal bowls still unwashed; the oriental chimes not orientally chiming. How stable everything was when he wasn't there! Everything remained in its place until he moved it. Unless, that is, Stagger haunted it in his absence, pawing his stuff, then returning it exactly where it had been.

Kimiko had visited his place (home?) only once or twice. She couldn't abide the moldy shower curtain, the cockroach families vacationing in the kitchen, the flatulent reek of singlehood infusing everything. She may have initially found it exotic—an endearing symptom of Jo's prolonged youth, perhaps; a recognizable point on this little patient's trajectory, something she could work with. It had become obvious quickly that she couldn't be turned on within the walls of this dystopic dorm-room replica. Joshua hadn't insisted; he'd been pretty content to spend nights (and many long days) at her place. That way he'd practice being fully adult while retaining an escape tunnel into his prolonged adolescence; that way everything here could enjoy its comfortable stasis. Man reaches a point in his life when unchanging becomes a matter of pride; the habits and remnants of youth are thereafter kept in the museum of the self.

When Kimmy was gone for a conference in Orlando or some such hotel-and-Enrique-friendly place, Joshua would spend days writing at his abode, leaving it only for work and movie rentals. Back when he'd been a true adolescent, with Janet acing it in college and his still-married parents frequently absconding to Michigan for a weekend with the Blunts, he'd liked to stay at home by himself. He wouldn't go out, wouldn't invite his friends over, wouldn't wash dishes or shower—he'd just read, drink, watch movies, and masturbate. It was bachelor-pad communism: producing according to one's abilities, consuming according to one's needs, but no commune to get on your nerves. Come Saturday night, he'd reach a utopia of abandon, a delightful blankness of mind that eradicated the outside world in all its unrewarding complications. He'd clean up the place only a couple of hours before his parents' return. At least once, the outside world had barged in unexpectedly, Bernie returning too soon, catching him naked and deeply invested in porn. Months of indulgent therapy would follow.

He should call Bernie again, he recognized. If he called him now, he wouldn't mention his prostate; he would simply tell him he was moving in with Kimmy; that would make him happy, maybe help him forget his cancer for a little bit. Then again, Bernie was long-winded, even when he was not terrified of dying. Besides, what could Joshua actually tell him? Everything will be okay? Maybe it would be better if he called Connie to tell her about his father's prostate
goyter
, maybe she'd take enough pity on Bernie to take care of him. Or he could call Janet, she'd know what to do.

Joshua put his coffee down and straightened the fox-hunt picture. There was no sense in cleaning this mess up. A better man would say goodbye to this disarray, to this life of entropy. It was time perhaps to fully join the adult world, take responsibilities, assist his father in need, be worthy of a grown-up woman. The fact was, there was little he wanted from this place (home? nah!), except maybe some clean underwear. If somehow all this were to burn down, he'd experience no feeling of loss whatsoever; on the contrary, it would be a kind of purging. The great American cycle: catastrophe prompting reinvention; reinvention resulting in further catastrophe, and on we roll toward apocalypse and redemption. Script Idea #99:
A foxhunt from the fox's point of view
.

In his bedroom, his underwear was washed and folded on his bed in a neat, unfamiliar stack. And there, next to it, was Ana, her legs crossed, her fingers entangled on her knee, wagging impatiently her shoe on the tip of her foot. She looked like she'd been waiting for him for a long time, ripening.