Zombie (7 page)

Doodles cover other Post-its, drawn in dark, heavy black pen, carved into the paper like they’d been traced hundreds of times. The doodles look crude and violent; body parts wearing Windsor knots—a foot, an arm, an ear, a tongue. Everywhere I look I see more body parts with fat knots. More numbers and more dates. Older dates going back before July and more names.

Everly, Kleaversdorf, Vaille, Goodwell, Robison, Price, Young
.

The handwriting is small—no, not small, tiny.

There is an open book, a dissected face diagramed and cut down into specific parts, showing the layers of muscles and nerves and bone. I flip it closed with my thumb as a placeholder and run my fingers over the red fabric of the cover:
Christopher’s Textbook of Surgery
. I push back from the desk and open his desk drawers, descending, starting at the top and moving down with increasing speed. I dig through pens and legal pads, a calculator and realty brochures and business cards with Dad’s face and fake fucking smile, a home office medical kit filled with Band-Aids, gauze, a tiny bottle of iodine, and medical manuals on emergency field surgery. I flip through hanging folders, mostly bills and birth certificates, social security cards, and bank statements, but also Dad’s not-so-secret collection of seventies
Playboys
. Mainly girls with hairy bushes and big hair. Dad doesn’t know that I know about his handful of old man magazines because Jackson showed me once when I was asking him questions about boobs and why they all had different sizes. The pages are fragile, stiff and wrinkled from water damage. These magazines were the magazines that Dad carried with him when he was
in the shit
, as he likes to say, soaked through from the torrents of rain.

His magazines are nothing like my magazines.

I open his office closet. It looks like an evidence locker in the basement of a police station. A floor-to-ceiling shelving unit bursts at the seams with boxes of all sizes. Thick black words mark boxes in years—
1987, 1996, 2001
—or in names and associations—
Jackson/College
,
Corrine/Medical Rehab, Jeremy/Summer Camp, Ballentine/Brochures, Dog/Veterinarian
. Minimal, cold, exact.

I thumb through the more accessible boxes at the bottom of the closet marked in years. Boring shit mostly—incomprehensible financial paperwork with tricolored pie charts and line graphs and percentage numbers. I move on to a few boxes marked with names and associations, but they really interest me less, that is except for one.

It’s clearly the largest box in the closet—unmarked, anonymous, a plain brown box. I slide it off the shelf and place it on the floor. The box is deep and heavy and long. I unfold the flaps and find that the box
is
marked along the inside flaps, with tiny lettering, to be kept a secret.

Ballentine Barker’s Box of War
.

Inside, there’s a story. First, a canteen. I shake it. It’s empty, but I unscrew the top anyway and am hit with the smell of some kind of alcohol. Whisky, I think—something Dad said he always asked my grandparents to send him. An envelope holding a necklace with two silver tags, dog tags. Folded, faded maps—absolutely nothing recognizable to me. A stack of Polaroids. Young Dad holding big guns. Dad standing with other Marines, holding their own big guns. Dad and other Marines with their big guns at the camera. Other Marines with their big guns at each other. Smaller guns to their own heads. Their big guns at photos of naked women with big bushes taped to the wall of their barracks. Dad looks thin and clean cut, wide-eyed, but not in a scared way, instead in a wide-eyed, let-too-much-light-in kind of way. He smiles in most of the photos, a similar smile to the fake fucking one he has in all of his realtor materials. Dad wears a green T-shirt and camouflage, smokes a cigarette, his arm around another Marine, a blond guy. They stand in front of a jungle that’s completely in flames. The caption reads:
OBLIVION
. In another picture, Dad drinks a can of beer, standing over a dead body—face down on the ground. The dead body is missing an ear, like it had been cut clean off. Dried blood caked
around the wound from where it dripped down the side of his face. It was so clear that I could even see flies that had landed on the body. Pictures of foreign women in bars barely dressed—whores or hopeless women in short skirts with a lot of make-up. Some make kissy faces at the camera. Two girls French kiss in a blurry haze of red and green neon light. A girl hangs on Dad’s arm and the girl isn’t Mom. The girl is Asian. Another picture of Dad, sitting on a cot in a tent, shirtless, dog tags dangling down—above him a sign written in red paint:
FUCK THIS SHIT
. The last picture is a profile picture, like George Washington in the Purple Heart. Dad is sticking out his tongue through a smile.

My hand brushes up against something cold. It looks wet or frozen or recently shined. Resting there. If it had teeth, it would have bitten my hand clean off. Black handle. Pinky-finger-sized hole. A body and a chamber. Curved angles. Masterful arcs of steel. I flip it over like it’s a dead fish—not wet or frozen. Heavy and recently cleaned as a streak of grease rubs onto my hand. I feel the weight of the gun in my hand. An electric charge races through my body, etching under my skin. I raise it and aim it at Young Dad. I hold it steady, not ready to let go, locking it away into my own personal prison. I release the air from my body in a long controlled exhale, a smooth and single stream, and when I don’t have any air left in my body to keep me alive I pull the trigger.

The gun—click.

The front door—bang.

The gun isn’t loaded.

The gun is still in my hand and Dad is coming through the door, struggling with Dog’s leash. Shit. I tuck the gun back into the
Ballentine Barker Box of War
, slap the flaps down. Shit. Dad couldn’t be making any more noise in the foyer if he tried, coughing, grunting, walking, moving, breathing, whatever-the-fucking. His presence sounds immediate, like he’s on top of me. Like he’s in the office. Like he’s standing over me, towering. Shit. Dog scrambles across the hardwood floor, released from the leash, her nails scratching as she moves through the house—foyer, dining room, kitchen. She drinks
her water, her tongue slapping the water—a tired dog after a hard run. I stop moving and listen for him but don’t hear anything until he calls out my name. Shit. The hardwood floors creak and tremor under his heavy steps as he sweeps the first floor looking for me like I did him. Shit. I lift the box of war back to its shelf and slide it into place, pushing it against the wall.

Zombie Survival Code Three.

Erase, forget it, get gone.

Never knew a thing.

Never happened.

D
ad shouts my name from the foyer again. Frankly, I’m surprised he remembers me at all. I sneak out of his office when his back is turned. He closes the front door and finally finds me standing in the foyer too. I could have come from anywhere and he knows it.

“I got a call from your school today,” he says.

“It was only Algebra,” I say.

“Did you get lost?” he asks. “The school is one giant hallway. I don’t understand how you get lost in one giant hallway.”

“You didn’t pick me up after school,” I say. “More than that, you disappeared last night and didn’t come home until this morning.”

Dog sits by his feet, licking her chops.

“Good girl,” he says. “Good girl.” Dad slaps her side in hard thuds.

“If you won’t tell me where you were last night, then tell me where you were this afternoon?”

He hangs Dog’s leash over the banister and steps past me.

“I asked you a question,” I say. I run down the hallway, and step in his way.

“You’re as neurotic as your fucking mother,” he says. “Fine. You want to know. I was with Liza.”

“Liza? Who the fuck is Liza?”

“Please move,” he says.

“Stop lying to me.”

“Please, Jeremy.”

“Were you with Liza last night? Or just this afternoon?”

“I’m sorry for not telling you about her sooner,” Dad says without anything behind it. “She’s someone I’ve been seeing. She’s an ER nurse at Johns Hopkins, so her schedule is always changing.”

“Call her up,” I say. “Get her on the phone. I want to talk to her. I want to meet her. Let’s make a meet-the-family date. Chinese and an old zombie classic.
I Walked With a Zombie
. Chicks dig black-and-white, right, Dad? You taught me that. Call her up.”

“I’ll be in my office,” he says, placing his hands on my shoulders and gently moving me out of his way.

“What’s her last name? Where does she live?”

Before Dad disappears into his office, I clap my hands together. It startles him. Dad looks back at me.

“Where were you?” I ask.

He kicks his office door closed. The fuck.

I press my ear to the door. Silence simmers inside. String-based orchestral music soon slices away the nothingness, before heavy brass marches in.

“I can still hear you,” I say, punching the door. “Can you hear me?” I punch the door with both hands now. “What’s her last name?” My fists flatten against the wood. Holding the door steady with one hand, I slap the door with the other, machine-gunning. I bang harder and louder and call him by name
—Ballentine, Ballentine, Ballentine!
I turn the knob and push and pull, throwing all of my weight behind it, but the door doesn’t budge and instead makes a
clunk-clunk
sound. I keep fucking banging and will continue to bang until he opens up and tells me about the picture of the dead body in his box of war and how he was wounded in Vietnam and the gun and how this all has to do with some whore named Liza or something else altogether.

T
he earliest memory I have of Dad is: disappearing.

The house was empty.

I walked from room to room. The lights were off. I didn’t turn them on, or call out his name, for fear of disturbing whatever might be inside.

Dad was gone.

I searched. I scoured. A human flashlight, flicking on lights in every room, ridding them of nothing. Under the dining room table by the cherubs carved into the wooden chairs. Behind the couch in the living room. In his immaculate office. Under the monstrous desk in his immaculate office. In the closet next to the monstrous desk of his immaculate office. It felt like he wanted me to find him. Like we were playing hide-and-seek. I opened the front door and turned on the outside light that lit up the night in a damning shade of a dark glow, the pumpkins seemingly bigger, casting shadows. Bushes and trees looked like monster claws and demon smiles. I listened for him, recognizing nothing.

Then, I heard something new in the darkness, coming from the basement. A groan—guttural and God-awful. Monster claws. Demons smiles. I slammed the front door with both hands, fumbling with the several levels of locks and latches, turning off the light outside and turning on the one inside. The groan grew louder. I moved away from the door and retreated further inside the house. With each step, it grew—a cold silence standing between each growing groan. Then. There. I saw it—the basement door ajar.

This is my earliest memory, the memory I remember foremost.

My tiny fingers pulled back the chipped, white door without a squeak, the opposite of horror movies. The door was dead quiet, opening easy like the legs of some whore. The door swung wide and I hid behind it, peering through the thin space between the door and the frame, angling my anxious eyes down the dark stairwell to the basement, searching for the hellbeast.

I measured the groans in slow, whispered Mississippi’s.

A heavy shadow moved below. I wanted to flip the switch, but it was too high up on the wall, just out of reach even if I stood on the tips of my toes. The groan picked up and lasted longer, lifting louder, before it bellied up and broke into a growl, coming up out of the blackness, gaining on me. Devils and demons. Growing and growing greater.

At the basement stairs. Footsteps thumping, ascending from below, shrugging off the black, heavy and hard. Either feet or cloven hooves—something broken, something wrong, something foul. And in the moment before the devils and demons devoured me, I covered my eyes with my hands and prayed the Lord’s Prayer. This was the only prayer I knew wholly, a prayer I’d heard my mother say every day, twenty times a day, whenever she’d take her pills. I said the prayer with my head in my hands, as the darkness rose up around me.

This is the earliest memory I have of my dad, the first, most part of me.

I
n my bedroom, I flip through Tricia’s September issue of
InStyle
. An exotic, beautiful woman—some actress or musician or both, I’m not entirely sure—is on the cover, wearing a Japanese kimono embroidered with a purple dragon stitched into the seemingly silk fabric. She holds the kimono just below her shoulders; her head tilted back, her thick, blonde hair so curly it makes me want to lose my hands in it. Her teeth are too white and perfect. On either side of her photo are titles of articles, indicating more often than not how to do something better, whether it be lose weight, have sex, apply makeup, wear bathing suits, flirt, cook, tell if your man is lying, or avoid general embarrassment. I turn to a tampon advertisement where women hold hands as they jump off a cliff. They are barefoot and wear bikinis. There is no way this many women would jump off a cliff together at the same time. I lick my index finger and turn the page at the upper right hand corner and read a personal essay on cutting, a disorder where people cut their skin in order to feel. The article cites the disorder as a serious form of depression. I flip back to the picture of the women holding hands, jumping off the cliff. The tag at the bottom of the tampon ad reads:
NO FEAR
. I turn back and forth, looking at the women jumping off the cliff and the article on cutters. Then, I go on autopilot and flip through each page like a machine counting cash—fast and without hesitation. Before I finish, I’m at my closet, sorting through the two-dozen board games stacked inside, finally opening one—
Stratego
—and lay the September
InStyle
inside. I pull down
Battleship
filled with more of the same magazines, but also my backup locker combination,
which I slide into my shoe. I ease
Stratego
and
Battleship
back into place and step back, admiring my collection.