Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

The terrible inconclusiveness seriously impeded his will to rise. As soon as the dream residues dissolved into full oblivion, a terrible doubt would start forming, weighing on his intestines, concentrating in globs in his muscles, so that he kept tossing in search of a position comfortable enough for snoozing. The painful doubt would swell like a balloon, steadily squeezing out of his head all that he’d seemed to have accomplished or thought up theretofore.

This morning, all of the love for Kimmy, painstakingly accrued, all of their earned closeness, was transformed into a sense of entrapment, enhanced by her sleeping quietly, romantically next to him, a warm pile of a stranger’s flesh. He pretended to sleep until Kimmy left for work, leaving an indentation on the pillow and a single long, whorled hair. Therein was a trace of the woman he was supposed to love; he had all the reasons to love her; he’d bragged about her to others: his Zen mistress, brash, self-sufficient, and prone to kinkiness (yet to be fully exploited). But he now found comfort in her absence; he liked the idea of her, but her presence — sometimes, presently — made him want to be alone. A desire that arises from joy is stronger, other things being equal, than one that arises from sadness.

Then there was the Stagger incident, the fact that he’d had to escape from his apartment, hadn’t dared to call the police, and had entirely failed to be sufficiently aggressive and angry. A better man would kick Stagger’s ass, hurt him terribly. Revenge is a dish best served with carpet bombing. But what Joshua wanted was for all of it to simply resolve itself, as it undoubtedly would, without his having to do anything radical. Somehow, someday, it must be resolved.

And then there was the continuous fiasco of his writing. Once upon a time, Joshua had read Portnoy’s Complaint and figured he too could write novels — it hadn’t seemed overly taxing, all one had to do was be unsparingly honest. Then he’d read Goodbye, Columbus and thought he could write short stories instead. He would write only one, about a seventeen-year-old so urgently intent on deflowerment that he saved money and hired an escort, who then refused to sleep with him because she didn’t believe he was old enough. He’d entitled it “The Age of Consent” and it’d kept being awful, no rewrite improving it one bit, because he repeatedly changed his mind about what happened: in one version, the escort blew the hero; in the other, she blew his brains out; in the terminal revision, they embarked upon furniture-crashing sex just as Joshua dropped his pen. But he’d thought the dialogue was bearable, and he’d been trying to write scripts since. The problem, however, was that he could never figure out how to establish the necessary determinism of the plot: characters would do this or that, while neither his will nor his talent was ever strong enough to compel them to follow their goddamn trajectory. When the mind imagines its own lack of power, it is saddened by it.

In the ten years he’d been doing it, none of the handful of scripts he’d finished had ever got close to being read, let alone optioned, by any film people; none had gone far in any of the screenwriting contests he’d entered, while the unfinished scripts were almost certain to remain unfinished. He had files upon files of script ideas in his computer, but none of them developed or stood any chance of development: most of them died within the first draft of the first scene, unable to take off and come anywhere near a self-sustaining plot. He took screenwriting workshops, which were exactly like going to the gym: he never got stronger, never felt any better, just more tired; but if he didn’t work out, he’d turn frighteningly obese and die from a stroke.

He got up, the doubt now a shadow hovering at his shoulder while he brushed his teeth, muttering nasty things into his ear, deriding the weakness in his face, the limpness in his muscles, the someone else’s Fire shirt he was wearing. Then it followed him to the kitchen, where it maliciously moved the cup as he was pouring coffee into it, so he was forced to spend an eternity wiping the counter, everything in him sagging into a sludge of despair. The coffee Kimmy had made wasn’t strong enough, yet there was no other coffee to be drunk. Perhaps anything at all could be the accidental cause of hope, but this morning there wasn’t much of anything.

And there was nowhere to go. He took up a position on the sofa to work on his screenwriting, nothing else left to do. Bushy curled up at his feet and turned up his purring rotor, uninterested in Joshua’s struggles. The doubt was radiating unhealthy light from the laptop screen as he decided to give Zombie Wars another try. He opened the file, wrote the slug line: INT. WRIGLEY FIELD — NIGHT . Now what?

Before Joshua could immerse himself in correlating the Cubs and the apocalypse, the distracting memory of Ana presented itself to him, detail by detail: the curve of her neck as she leaned to grace the margin of Let’s Go, America! 5 with her phone number; the momentary pursing of her lips and the double dimple; her smell: jasmine and sweet sweat; her short, boyish hair, likely hennaed; her legs crossed, dangling her shoe on her big toe. Soon the infinitely rewarding universe of Internet porn was beckoning him — but the DSL cord was far beyond the horizon of his will and, even if he could get off the sofa, self-abuse would relieve neither his doubt nor his longing. There was no remedy for the unsettling fact that Ana, along with all the other women of the world, was elsewhere, and he was here. Right here, conceiving a zombie pitcher repeatedly dropping the ball, sprawled on the sofa in the living room of his newish life: the yoga mat in the umbrella spittoon; the polished pseudotropical plants in the corners; the inedible multicolor pasta in the tall jars; the pictures of Kimmy’s numerous family scattered on the bookshelves; the books about amazing animal friendships and Japanese-American internment camps on the coffee table; and upstairs, in the corner of a deep drawer reeking of lavender, a treasure chest of titillating sex toys.

Bushy transitioned to the windowsill to look out at Magnolia, where leafless tree crowns scrambled the morning light, where bicycles with training wheels lingered on the porches, Andersonville dreaming itself up. A large mailman pushed a bundle through the front door mail slot, waving and smiling through the window at Joshua, who waved back at him. Joshua couldn’t hear anything, but he had plenty of reasons to believe that all the birds out there were atwitter.

The phone rang from atop the stack of coffee-table books and he picked it up unthinkingly, as if he were at home.

“Hey, Jonjo man!” Stagger said. “What’s brewing?”

“Stagger? Are you out of your fucking mind?” It was self-evidently a rhetorical question. “How did you get this number?”

“You left your cell phone here, buddy. It looks like the only people you ever call other than Mom Wilmette and Bernie Dad are Kimiko Cell and Kimiko M. Home. What does M. stand for?”

“It stands for motherfucker, you crazy motherfucker!” Joshua slammed the phone down on the coffee table and stood up as if it had just bitten him. When it rang again he stared at it with blinding hatred, until the answering machine in the kitchen turned on.

“Jonjo, Jonjo … A friend less loyal than me wouldn’t put up with such language.” Stagger’s nasal tone was of someone affecting indifference.

“Fuck you!” said Joshua to the answering machine.

“But you might care to know that an Ana called to ask about—”

Joshua rushed to the kitchen to pick up the phone, slipping on the floor in his tube socks.

“Who called?”