Aleksandar Hemon: The Making of Zombie Wars

The pageless Joshua, equipped only with the vaguest zombie memories, was thus ensconced in a purple beanbag on Graham’s living-room floor. Pretzels and a spacious plastic bottle of defizzed Diet Coke crowded the coffee table. With his testicles squeezed by his twisted underwear, Joshua avoided all eye contact with the beflanelled Dillon, who was outlining some idea of his, hip-deep in the faded, sunken futon. Bega was there too, hunched at the desk in a Motörhead T-shirt, contemplating the splendorously lit Wrigley Field in Graham’s window. The baseball crowd emitted a home-run roar and Bega grunted wistfully, his thick, unneatly parted gray hair conspicuously rhyming with the grayish shrub on his face. Graham interrupted Dillon’s rambling to make a point by sharing a pertinent section from the script he’d just completed.

“‘Blessed be the amateurs!’” Graham spoke in the bloated voice of one of his cardboard characters. “‘The triers, the failers, the shit-swimmers! Let us praise those who dream big and achieve nothing, those undaunted by impossibilities, entrapped by possibilities! They are the dung beetles of the American Dream, the unsung little fertilizers of American soil.’”

Graham rubbed his thumb pensively against his cleft chin as he looked up at his audience for their reaction: Dillon was looming over an open notebook in his lap, writing something down furiously; Bega nodded, chewing his Bic pen to pieces; Joshua was fixated on Graham, but only because his very balls were swelling in the painful squeeze. Addressing the problem required standing up and shoving his hand into his pants to free his testicles from the grip of his underwear. He was not ready for such a commitment, so he endured. The mind can imagine nothing except while the body endures.

“Just so you don’t wonder what happens,” Graham continued, “my boy goes on to make it big. He’s gonna bottom out at the end of Act Two, but then comes back in Act Three, winning a Golden Globe.”

Joshua tried to reach for his backpack, but the pain in his groin made him gasp and sit back. Graham’s living room was overwhelmed with paperbacks — on the shelves, on the floor, on the windowsills — all of them dusty and invested in the magic of film and the science of screenwriting. The only wall without books featured a gigantic poster for The Godfather: Part II , Al Pacino looming over them like Jesus in an altarpiece.

“This is all based on a true story, gentlemen. Hollywood big shots lined up all the way to the Hills to have a diet soda with me, but I wasn’t gonna let them fuck me! No, sir!” Graham flashed his middle finger to the erstwhile line of big shots. “Feel free to fuck yourselves, you bunch of Weinsteins!”

Graham rocked back and forth, Hasid-like, as he ranted, his bald crown reddening patchily like a lava lamp. Bega seemed to enjoy the rant, as he abandoned the Bic mastication for a hearty laugh. Meanwhile, Joshua rolled out of the beanbag to stand up, grimacing in the pain overriding Graham’s anti-Semitic insinuations.

“Point is,” Graham continued, “you’re willing to learn, and that’s undoubtedly fucking great. So, Dillon, to be perfectly and productively honest, that’s far from the smartest idea I’ve ever heard. But we’re gonna work on it all day long and we’re gonna make it good.”

Dillon wrote something down, then turned the page to write some more. Joshua finally pulled down his pants to release his balls, in the process of which his navel-eye blinked at everyone from a tuft of hair.

“What in hell are you doing?” Graham asked.

“Inadvertent self-wedgie,” Joshua explained.

Graham clapped his hands, startling Dillon. “Do you hear that, Dillon? Inadvertent self-wedgie! Write that down! That’s what you want your characters to say, not some anodyne bullshit about corporate greed.”

The pleasure of untwisting his balls was compounded by Graham’s praise, so Joshua felt entitled to make Dillon scoot over so he could sit down on the futon. He examined the night outside: the sparkle of the ball game all over Wrigleyville; the lit El train struggling along the Sheridan curve; the Lake Shore skyscrapers on the horizon; the endless darkness beyond. Bega shook his hair over the desk, as if trying to get something out of it. Could it be lice?

Joshua had been in Screenwriting I with Bega; they’d never talked much beyond exchanging remarks on their inchoate scripts. Bega would always project mean superiority while mocking the inane plots in the pages of other workshoppers. His plots would not be much better, but he’d protect himself by withholding their resolutions, claiming he wanted to keep the workshoppers involved.

“Is there such a thing as an advertent self-wedgie?” Dillon asked.

“There are all kinds of wedgies. Let a thousand flowers bloom,” Graham said. “What happens next?”

Dillon consulted his notebook. There was no writing in its pages, Joshua noticed, only doodled arabesques.

“They’re like in the desert,” Dillon said, “and there are like all these things. He like stops by the fear booth and these like guys ask him what his fears are and he says, it’s like sharks and waves, and these like guys come out dressed as his worst fears and like follow him around. And then he takes ’shrooms with the goth girl, and they go on the most fantastic trip of their like life, and then he decides not to go on to LA for the job and like live with the goth girl in the desert community.”

Graham watched him intently, conceptualizing the fear booth and the guys dressed as sharks and waves. “That’s gonna cost a lot of money,” he said.

Evidently, money had never crossed Dillon’s mind — he wrote money in an empty space left between the arabesques, then underlined it twice.

“Fact: you need no money to write a script, but you need oodles to make a movie. Fact: you will have to beg for money, part of the job.” Graham began rocking again. “And the Weinsteins will unleash their twenty-two-year-old dipshit suckerfish to skim your life’s work in one lazy afternoon. Then they’ll throw at you the piddly coin they spend monthly on their chest depilation and expect you to work with that. You need to know you’re nothing to them! You’re a zero! Absolute fucking nothing! Zero!”

Bega laughed again — Graham’s hatred of the Weinsteins seemed to amuse him to no end. Joshua’s chest constricted with a gasp of guilt — he should counter the slight, but couldn’t. Dillon blinked in what must have been panic at the blotches floating across the expanses of Graham’s cranium. He then returned to the safety of doodling: at phenomenal speed he was now turning spirals into tornadoes, which in the upper half of the page biblically connected with darkness. On the opposite, tornado-free page, there was a scene featuring stick people with speech bubbles over their O -heads, one of them grasping an oval surfboard with his stick hand. Zombie Wars , Joshua thought. Where do we go from nowhere?

“The good news is that if you could get a hunky male star to be the surfer dude you might be able to find some dough,” Graham said, having steadied himself. “Maybe that, what’s his name, Hartnett?”

“I think you should make this dude more of real person,” Bega said. It was surprising to hear him talk — he’d been laughing on the fringes all night. “He should be normal, little bit of philosopher, maybe loser. Like Josh here.”

In Screenwriting I, Bega had wittily and deservedly, Joshua thought, picked on a Peruvian whose drafts had featured Inca gods fighting sea monsters. This time Joshua said: “Me? How did I come into this?”

From a distance, they all examined Joshua, the survivor of an inadvertent self-wedgie: the body of a lightweight wrestler who’d quit wrestling after middle school; the droopy eyes that, in a more flattering light, could appear contemplatively sorrowful; the slight overbite that often made him look unduly perplexed.