John Adams: The Living Dead

He stops talking. Carly takes his hand. She squeezes it. She says, “That’s the weirdest story I’ve ever heard. Why is it that everything is so much sadder and funnier and so much more true when you’re drunk?”

“I haven’t told you the weird part yet,” Will says. He can’t tell her the weirdest part of the story, although maybe he can try to show her.

“Did I tell you that I used to be on my school’s debate team?” Carly says. “That’s the weirdest thing about me. I like getting in arguments. The boy with his head under my chair, I kicked his ass in a debate about marijuana. I humiliated him all over the map.”

Will doesn’t use drugs anymore. It’s too much like being in a museum. It makes everything look like art, and makes everything feel like just before the zombies show up. He says, “The museum said that I hadn’t stolen the little painting from them. They said it wasn’t theirs, even when I explained the whole thing. I told the truth and everyone thought I was lying. The police asked around, just in case Mike and I had done the same thing somewhere else, at some other museum, and nobody came forward. Nobody knew the artist’s name. So finally they just gave the painting back to me. They thought I was trying to pull some scam.”

“So what happened to it?” Carly says.

“I’ve still got it. My sister kept it for me while I was in prison,” Will says. “For two years. Since I got out, I’ve been trying to find a place to ditch it. I’ve left it a couple of places, but then it turns out that I haven’t. I can’t leave it behind. No matter how hard I try. It doesn’t belong to me, but I can’t get rid of it.”

“My friend Jessica does this thing she calls shopleaving,” Carly says. “When someone gives her a hideous shirt for her birthday or if she buys a book and it’s not any good, she goes into a store and leaves the shirt on a hanger. She leaves the book on the shelf. Once she took this crazy, mean parakeet to a shoe store and put him in a shoebox. What happened to your friend? Mike?”

“He went to Seattle. He started up a website for ex-cons. He got a lot of funding. There are a lot of people out there who have been in prison. They need websites.”

“That’s nice,” Carly says. “That’s like a happy ending.”

“I’ve got the painting in the car,” Will says. “Do you want it?”

“I like van Gogh,” Carly says. “And Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“Let me go get it,” Will says. He goes downstairs before she can stop him. The guys on the couch are watching somebody’s wedding video now. He wonders what they would think if they knew Carly was upstairs in bed, waiting for him. The dancing girl is in the kitchen with the boy under the table. The girl in the dress is out on the lawn. She isn’t doing anything except maybe looking at stars. She watches Will go to his car, open the trunk, and take out the little painting. Out behind the house, Will can hear people in the pool. Will hasn’t felt this peaceful in a long time. It’s like that first slow part in a horror movie, before the bad thing happens. Will knows that sometimes you shouldn’t try to anticipate the bad thing. Sometimes you are supposed to just listen to swimmers fooling around in a pool. People you can’t see. The night and the moon and the girl in the dress. Will stands on the lawn for a while, holding the painting, wishing that Becka was here with him. Or Mike.

Will takes the painting back upstairs and into the master bedroom. He turns the lights off and wakes Carly up. She’s been crying in her sleep. “Here it is,” he says.

“Will?” Carly says. “You turned off the light. Is it the ocean? It looks like the ocean. I can’t really see anything.”

“Sure you can,” Will says. “There’s moonlight.”

“I only have one contact lens in,” Carly says.

Will stands on the bed and lifts the painting of the garden off its picture hook. How can a painting of some flowers be so heavy? He leans it against the bed and hangs up the painting from the car. Iceberg, zombie, a bunch of trees. Some obscured and unknowable thing. How are you supposed to tell what it is? It makes him want to die, sometimes. “There you go,” he says. “It’s yours.”

“It’s beautiful,” Carly says. Will thinks maybe she’s crying again. She says, “Will? Will you just lie down with me? For a little while?”

Sometimes Soap has this dream. He isn’t sure whether it’s a prison dream or a dream about art or a dream about zombies. Maybe it isn’t about any of those things. He dreams that he’s in a dark room. Sometimes it’s an enormous room, very long and narrow. Sometimes there are people in it, leaning silently up against the walls. He can only figure out if there are people or how big the room is when he stretches out his arms and walks forward. He has no idea what they’re doing in the room with him. He has no idea what he’s supposed to do, either. Sometimes it’s a very small room. It’s dark. It’s dark.

“Hey, kid. Hey, Leo. Wake up, Leo. We gotta go.” Soap is lying on the floor beside the bed, holding up the dust ruffle. He has to whisper. Carly is asleep on the too-big bed, under the covers.

Leo uncurls. He wriggles forward, towards Will. Then he wiggles back again, away from Will. He’s maybe six or seven years old. “Who are you?” Leo says. “Where’s Carly?”

“Carly sent me to get you, Leo,” Soap says. “You have to be very, very quiet and do exactly what I say. There are zombies in the house. There are brain-eating zombies in the house. We have to get to a safe place. We have to go get Carly. She needs us.” Leo stretches out his hand. Soap takes it and pulls him out from under the bed. He picks Leo up. Leo holds on to Will tightly. He doesn’t weigh a lot, but he’s so warm. Little kids have fast metabolisms.

“The zombies are chasing Carly?” Leo says.

“That’s right,” Soap says. “We have to go save her.”

“Can I bring my robot?” Leo says.

“I’ve already put your robot in the car,” Will says. “And your dinosaur T-shirt and your basketball.”

“Are you Wolverine?” Leo says.

“That’s right,” Wolverine says. “I’m Wolverine. Let’s get out of here.”

Leo says, “Can I see your claws?”

“Not now,” Wolverine says.

“I have to go to the bathroom before we go,” Leo says.

“Okay,” Wolverine says. “That’s a great idea. I’m proud of you for telling me that.”

Some things that you could try with zombies, but which won’t work:

•Panic.

•Don’t panic. Remain calm.

•Call the police.

•Take them out to dinner. Get them drunk.

•Ask them to come back later.

•Ignore them.

•Take them home.

•Tell them jokes. Play board games with them.

•Tell them you love them.

•Rescue them.

Wolverine and Leo have a backpack. They put a box of Cheerios and some bananas and Leo and Carly’s parents’ gun and a Game Boy and some batteries and a Ziploc bag full of twenty-dollar bills from the closet in the master bedroom in the backpack. There’s a late-night horror movie on TV, but no one is there to watch it. The girl in the dress on the lawn is gone. If there’s someone in the pool, they’re keeping quiet.

Wolverine and Leo get in Wolverine’s car and drive away.

Carly is dreaming that she’s the President of the United States of America. She’s living in the White House—it turns out that the White House is built out of ice. It’s more like the Whitish Greenish Bluish House. Everybody wears big fur coats and when President Carly gives presidential addresses, she can see her breath. All her words hanging there. She’s hanging out with rock stars and Nobel Prize winners. It’s a wonderful dream. Carly’s going to save the world. Everyone loves her, even her parents. Her parents are so proud of her. When she wakes up, the first thing she sees—before she sees all the other things that are missing besides the oil painting of the woods that nobody lives in, nobody painted, and nobody stole—is the empty space on the wall in the bedroom above her parents’ bed.