Zombie (34 page)

I squat down, leaning away from the crowd. I let my stomach squeeze in on itself like a spasming muscle, but nothing comes up except gags. I cover my eyes with my hand as I turn back to the crowd and catch a glimpse of Rembrandt lifting the leg into the air like a newborn baby, blood pouring off the limb. Christ. He says, “Oh, absurdity of absurdities!”

The men respond with an avalanche of sound, rising up and crashing down—a collective primal scream. A communal prayer. One voice. A release. They raise fists into the air, pumping them. Some others rub their erect dicks, humping air. Everyone, however, screams and none of them stop screaming until Rembrandt lowers the leg, a cue, dialing down the volume.

A fever breaks out in my body, sweat pouring out of me. I lift my mask a bit to breath, but the sickfuck stench chokes me worse when my mask comes off, so I jam it back down.

He says, “How much better it is to understand it all, to recognize it all, all the impossibilities and the stone wall; that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite.”

I look away. I want to stop this whole thing, but can’t. The doctors wrap him in blankets; shoot him up with God knows what. One doctor lights the end of a blowtorch, a thin blue flame firing. He aims it at the wound, searing it shut. The man on the bed rises up in a voiceless scream as the doctors fight to keep him down, and the blowtorch fully closes off the skin. The room stinks of burnt pig.

Rembrandt says, “Things finally come down to the business of revenge itself.” His voice changes, taking registration. “Month—September. Day—Fourth. Sublimation one—Samuel Rustom.” He ejects the blood-soaked blade from his electric drill and dips the blade in a bucket of scalding water nearby, steam pouring off the top. He raises it into the light after—a clean, brand new blade, ready for round two.

I
take self-inventory, but all I can focus on is breathing to calm my nerves and keep from vomiting more air. No one speaks. Some hyperventilate, gasping, fighting for air. A handful have their dicks out, erect, and carefully stroke without expression. Rembrandt walks to the center of the stage and wipes his hands with a towel, then claps in succession, like in class, and keeps clapping until the plastic drape opens and the secret room appears and the door opens and another gurney is pushed through covered in plastic.

The surgical prep routine is the same as before, and I choose not to watch.

Rembrandt cuts away the mask from the man’s head, but I cannot see his face from this distance. Rembrandt says, “We are but what we are—monsters—and cannot be a thing to be stopped unless presented with the opportunity of force.”

The men respond, “Yes.”

I say nothing.

Rembrandt eyes the surgical tools and lifts what looks to be a stainless steel S-shaped blade. He walks around the table and points to the body. . Rembrandt continues. “Beauty. Ignorance. Isolation. Rapture. These are what we know to be true.”

The men respond, “Yes.”

I don’t say shit.

The plastic still covers most of his body. For a flashing moment, I see his thick head of hair and how his eyes are taped shut and the tube jammed down his throat into his lungs.

Rembrandt angles the S-shaped blade and chokes up on the handle. Silence cuts across the room. Not a sound. We watch, wide-eyed. Some smile. One wags his tongue. Rembrandt tilts the blade forward, then back, marking the skin with thin slices, like he’s outlining his intended target. Blood seeps out slowly from the cuts. He raises the blade above his head, before lowering it slow again to the markings. Like he is chopping wood, aiming with practice swings first. He exhales and looks up. The light surrounds and swallows him. Controlled. Then. One more time. And one more test—up and down. The blade at his wrist. His eyes close. More breathing. More control. Then. They open. His eyes black. Then. A gut growl. The blade pulls back, glinting the light. The blade swings down. Rembrandt is up on his feet, his body behind the force, bringing it down with force. Leverage. Then. Contact. The blade chops through skin and bone like butter. Striking through to the bed with a heavy thud. Followed by a soft
ching
. The hand. Scrubbed raw. A dirty instrument. Now separate from his body. Flops to the floor like a wet and dirty rag.

My legs buckle and collapse to the floor, covered in plastic and sprayed with black blood. I scramble to gather myself, using the bat as a crutch. I am not the only one. One man stands dead center in front of the stage and cries, weeping uncontrollably.

Then, the man on the table erupts with life, flailing, shaking with seizure like movements, shaking blood from himself like water from a wet dog. Red streams of blood pump out in multiple sprays from his wound. Rembrandt—quiet. The only real sounds are of the plastic—the soft spray of blood in synchronized spurts as it hits. Plastic crunching under our feet. The man on the bed screams and gags and coughs through the tube. Just the way one would imagine it. A different man, one across from me, vomits onto the plastic covered floor.

Someone else says, “My Jesus.”

Rembrandt picks the hand up off the floor and says, “Oh, absurdity of absurdities!”

The men in the basement explode, louder this time, in screams, war cries, bigger than before, infinite. They raise their fists, shake them, pump them, until Rembrandt lowers the lost hand.

Rembrandt says, “… that you never will have an object for your spite. A sleight of hand. A bit of juggling. Card-sharper’s trick. It’s simply a mess. No knowing what and no knowing who, but in spite of all these uncertainties, still there is an ache in you, and the more you do not know, the worse the ache. Oh, the worse.” He looks over the masked men in the room. He says, “This is the business itself—to come at last to the deed itself, to the very act of revenge.” Then he says, “Month—September. Day—Fourth. Sublimation two—Ballentine Barker.”

T
his 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.

T
he 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.