Zombies: The Recent Dead (73 page)

“What are you talking about?” Eric said. “Charley’s not old.”

“How old do you think she is?” Batu said. “So what do you think? Should the toothpaste and the condiments go next to the Elmer’s glue and the hair gel and lubricants? Make a shelf of sticky things? Or should I put it with the chewing tobacco and the mouthwash, and make a little display of things that you spit?”

“Sure,” Eric said. “Make a little display. I don’t know how old Charley is, maybe she’s my age? Nineteen? A little older?”

Batu laughed. “A little older? So how old do you think I am?”

“I don’t know,” Eric said. He squinted at Batu. “Thirty-five? Forty?”

Batu looked pleased. “You know, since I started sleeping less, I think I’ve stopped getting older. I may be getting younger. You keep on getting a good night’s sleep, and we’re going to be the same age pretty soon. Come take a look at this and tell me what you think.”

“Not bad,” Eric said. “We could put watermelons with this stuff too, if we had watermelons. The kind with seeds. What’s the point of seedless watermelons?”

“It’s not such a big deal,” Batu said. He knelt down in the aisle, marking off inventory on his clipboard. “No big thing if Charley’s older than you think. Nothing wrong with older women. And it’s good you’re not bothered about the ghost dogs or the biting thing. Everyone’s got problems. The only real concern I have is about her car.”

“What about her car?” Eric said.

“Well,” Batu said. “It isn’t a problem if she’s going to live here. She can park it here for as long as she wants. That’s what the parking lot is for. But whatever you do: if she invites you to go for a ride, don’t go for a ride.”

“Why not?” Eric said. “What are you talking about?”

“Think about it,” Batu said. “All those dog ghosts.” He scooted down the aisle on his butt. Eric followed. “Every time she drives by here with some poor dog, that dog is doomed. That car is bad luck. The passenger side especially. You want to stay out of that car. I’d rather climb down into the Ausible Chasm.”

Something cleared its throat; a zombie had come into the store. It stood behind Batu, looking down at him. Batu looked up. Eric retreated down the aisle, towards the counter.

“Stay out of her car,” Batu said, ignoring the zombie.

“And who will be fired out of the cannon?” the zombie said. It was wearing a suit and tie. “My brother will be fired out of the cannon.”

“Why can’t you talk like sensible people?” Batu said, turning around and looking up. Sitting on the floor, he sounded as if he were about to cry. He swatted at the zombie.

The zombie coughed again, yawning. It grimaced at them. Something was snagged on its gray lips now, and the zombie put up its hand. It tugged, dragging at the thing in its mouth, coughing out a black, glistening, wadded rope. The zombie’s mouth stayed open, as if to show that there was nothing else in there, even as it held the wet black rope out to Batu. The wet thing hung down from its hands and became pajamas. Batu looked back at Eric. “I don’t want them,” he said. He looked shy.

“What should I do?” Eric said. He hovered by the magazines. Charlize Theron was grinning at him, as if she knew something he didn’t.

“You shouldn’t be here.” It wasn’t clear to Eric whether Batu was speaking to the zombie. “I have all the pajamas I need.”

The zombie said nothing. It dropped the pajamas into Batu’s lap.

“Stay out of Charley’s car!” Batu said to Eric. He closed his eyes and began to snore.

“Shit,” Eric said to the zombie. “How did you do that?”

There was another zombie in the store now. The first zombie took Batu’s arms and the second zombie took Batu’s feet. They dragged him down the aisle and toward the storage closet. Eric came out from behind the counter.

“What are you doing?” he said. “You’re not going to eat him, are you?”

But the zombies had Batu in the closet. They put the black pajamas on him, yanking them over the other pair of pajamas. They lifted Batu up onto the mattress, and pulled the blanket over him, up to his chin.

Eric followed the zombies out of the storage closet. He shut the door behind him. “So I guess he’s going to sleep for a while,” he said. “That’s a good thing, right? He needed to get some sleep. So how did you do that with the pajamas? Is there some kind of freaky pajama factory down there?” The zombies ignored Eric. They held hands and went down the aisles, stopping to consider candy bars and Tampax and toilet paper and all the things that you spit. They wouldn’t buy anything. They never did.

Eric went back to the counter. He wished, very badly, that his mother still lived in their apartment. He would have liked to call someone. He sat behind the register for a while, looking through the phone book, just in case he came across someone’s name and it seemed like a good idea to call them. Then he went back to the storage closet and looked at Batu. Batu was snoring. His eyelids twitched, and there was a tiny, knowing smile on his face, as if he were dreaming, and everything was being explained to him, at last, in this dream. It was hard to feel worried about someone who looked like that. Eric would have been jealous, except he knew that no one ever managed to hold on to those explanations, once you woke up. Not even Batu.

Hangi yol daha kısa?

Which is the shorter route?

Hangi yol daha kolay?

Which is the easier route?

Charley came by at the beginning of her shift. She didn’t come inside the All-Night. Instead she stood out in the parking lot, beside her car, looking out across the road, at the Ausible Chasm. The car hung low to the ground, as if the trunk were full of things. When Eric went outside, he saw that there was a suitcase in the backseat. If there were ghost dogs, Eric couldn’t see them, but there were doggy smudges on the windows.

“Where’s Batu?” Charley said.

“Asleep,” Eric said. He realized that he’d never figured out how the conversation would go, after that.

He said, “Are you going someplace?”

“I’m going to work,” Charley said. “Like normal.”

“Good,” Eric said. “Normal is good.” He stood and looked at his feet. A zombie wandered into the parking lot. It nodded at them, and went into the All-Night.

“Aren’t you going to go back inside?” Charley said.

“In a bit,” Eric said. “It’s not like they ever buy anything.” But he kept an eye on the All-Night, and the zombie, in case it headed towards the storage closet.

“So how old are you?” Eric said. “I mean, can I ask you that? How old you are?”

“How old are you?” Charley said right back.

“I’m almost twenty,” Eric said. “I know I look older.”

“No you don’t,” Charley said. “You look exactly like you’re almost twenty.”

“So how old are you?” Eric said again.

“How old do you think I am?” Charley said.

“About my age?” Eric said.

“Are you flirting with me?” Charley said. “Yes? No? How about in dog years? How old would you say I am in dog years?”

The zombie finished looking for whatever it was looking for inside the All-Night. It came outside and nodded to Charley and Eric. “Beautiful people,” it said. “Why won’t you ever visit my hand?”

“I’m sorry,” Eric said.

The zombie turned its back on them. It tottered across the road, looking neither to the left, nor to the right, and went down the footpath into the Ausible Chasm.

“Have you?” Charley said. She pointed at the path.

“No,” Eric said. “I mean, someday I will, I guess.”

“Do you think they have pets down there? Dogs?” Charley said.

“I don’t know,” Eric said. “Regular dogs?”

“The thing I think about sometimes,” Charley said, “is whether or not they have animal shelters, and if someone has to look after the dogs. If someone has to have a job where they put down dogs down there. And if you do put dogs to sleep, down there, then where do they wake up?”

“Batu says that if you need another job, you can come live with us at the All-Night,” Eric said. His lips felt so cold that it was hard to talk.

“Is
that
what Batu says?” Charley said. She started to laugh.

“Batu likes you,” Eric said.

“I like him too,” Charley said. “But I don’t want to live in a convenience store. No offense. I’m sure it’s nice.”

“It’s okay,” Eric said. “I don’t want to work retail my whole life.”

“There are worse jobs,” Charley said. She leaned against her Chevy. “Maybe I’ll stop by later tonight. We could always go for a long ride, go somewhere else, and talk about retail.”

“Like where? Where are you going?” Eric said. “Are you thinking about going to Turkey? Is that why Batu is teaching you Turkish?” He wanted to stand there and ask Charley questions all night long.

“I want to learn Turkish so that when I go somewhere else I can pretend to be Turkish. I can pretend I
only
speak Turkish. That way no one will bother me,” Charley said.

“Oh,” Eric said. “Good plan. We could always go somewhere and not talk, if you want to practice. Or I could talk to you, and you could pretend you don’t understand what I’m saying. We don’t have to go for a ride. We could just go across the road, go down into the Chasm. I’ve never been down there.”

“It’s not a big deal,” Charley said. “We can do it some other time.” Suddenly she looked much older.

“No, wait,” Eric said. “I do want to come with you. We can go for a ride. It’s just that Batu’s asleep. Someone has to look after him. Someone has to be awake to sell stuff.”

“So are you going to work there your whole life?” Charley said. “Take care of Batu? Figure out how to rip off dead people?”

“What do you mean?” Eric said.

“Batu says the All-Night is thinking about opening up another store, down there,” Charley said, waving across the road. “You and he are this big experiment in retail, according to him. Once the All-Night figures out what dead people want to buy, it’s going to be like the discovery of America all over again.”

“It’s not like that,” Eric said. He could feel his voice going up at the end, as if it were a question. He could almost smell what Batu meant about Charley’s car. The ghosts, those dogs, were getting impatient. You could tell that. They were tired of the parking lot, they wanted to be going for a ride. “You don’t understand. I don’t think you understand?”

“Batu said that you have a real way with dead people,” Charley said. “Most retail clerks flip out. Of course, you’re from around here. Plus you’re young. You probably don’t even understand about death yet. You’re just like my dogs.”

“I don’t know what they want,” Eric said. “The zombies.”

“Nobody ever really knows what they want,” Charley said. “Why should that change after you die?”

“Good point,” Eric said.

“You shouldn’t let Batu mess you around so much,” Charley said. “I shouldn’t be saying all this, I know. Batu and I are friends. But we could be friends too, you and me. You’re sweet. It’s okay that you don’t talk much, although this is okay too, us talking. Why don’t you come for a drive with me?” If there had been dogs inside her car, or the ghosts of dogs, then Eric would have heard them howling. Eric heard them howling. The dogs were telling him to get lost. They were telling him to fuck off. Charley belonged to them. She was
their
murderer.

“I can’t,” Eric said, longing for Charley to ask again. “Not right now.”

“Well, that’s okay. I’ll stop by later,” Charley said. She smiled at him and for a moment he was standing in that city where no one ever figured out how to put out that fire, and all the dead dogs howled again, and scratched at the smeary windows. “For a Mountain Dew. So you can think about it for a while.”

She reached out and took Eric’s hand in her hand. “Your hands are cold,” she said. Her hands were hot. “You should go back inside.”

Rengi begenmiyorum.

I don’t like the color.

It was already 4
am
and there still wasn’t any sign of Charley when Batu came out of the back room. He was rubbing his eyes. The black pajamas were gone. Now Batu was wearing pajama bottoms with foxes running across a field towards a tree with a circle of foxes sitting on their haunches around it. The outstretched tails of the running foxes were fat as zeppelins, with commas of flame hovering over them. Each little flame had a Hindenburg inside it, with a second littler flame above it, and so on. Some fires you just can’t put out.

The pajama top was a color that Eric could not name. Dreary, creeping shapes lay upon it. Eric had read Lovecraft. He felt queasy when he looked at the pajama top.

“I just had the best dream,” Batu said.

“You’ve been asleep for almost six hours,” Eric said. When Charley came, he would go with her. He would stay with Batu. Batu needed him. He would go with Charley. He would go and come back. He wouldn’t ever come back. He would send Batu postcards with bears on them. “So what was all that about? With the zombies.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Batu said. He took an apple from the fruit display and polished it on his non-Euclidean pajama top. The apple took on a horrid, whispery sheen. “Has Charley come by?”

“Yeah,” Eric said. He and Charley would go to Las Vegas. They would buy Batu gold lamé pajamas. “I think you’re right. I think she’s about to leave town.”

“Well, she can’t!” Batu said. “That’s not the plan. Here, I tell you what we’ll do. You go outside and wait for her. Make sure she doesn’t get away.”

“She’s not wanted by the police, Batu,” Eric said. “She doesn’t belong to us. She can leave town if she wants to.”

“And you’re okay with that?” Batu said. He yawned ferociously, and yawned again, and stretched, so that the pajama top heaved up in an eldritch manner. Eric closed his eyes.

“Not really,” Eric said. He had already picked out a toothbrush, some toothpaste, and some novelty teeth, left over from Halloween, which he could give to Charley, maybe. “Are you okay? Are you going to fall asleep again? Can I ask you some questions?”

“What kind of questions?” Batu said, lowering his eyelids in a way that seemed both sleepy and cunning.