Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

But Kimmy was not tranquilized at all: a bottle of dreadfully Chilean wine was on the dining-room table, a Bach cello suite droned on, a candle sputtered with lavender-scented flames, some dead animal smelled appetizingly from the oven. There was going to be a sharing of thoughts.

“I would like to talk to you, Jo,” Kimiko said, offering a place at the table as if it were a witness stand. She poured a full glass of wine for him and but a third for herself, and an arrow of fear whooshed into his chest to vibrate for a while: what if she was pregnant and about to announce it? She sat across from him; in the counterlight he could see the aura of her charged stray hairs. He’d begged Kimmy to let him watch her comb her long hair, but she never let him anywhere close to it, ever the empress of her domain.

“I’ve been thinking,” Kimmy said, “and wondering: how is it that I’ve never read any of your writing?”

Joshua swallowed half of his glass. Interesting: a touch of Chapstick, ginger-ale nose, cat-hair finish. He couldn’t remember the last time he actually enjoyed wine. Perhaps his nose was changing; perhaps his body was changing; perhaps an evil cell had already hatched in his groin.

“Well,” he said. “I never thought you would care to see any of it. Most of it is not done anyway. Scripts change constantly. No living person has ever finished a script.”

The truth was that he was too embarrassed to show any of it to her, fearing that she — she who combed her hair in privacy, who wrangled little patients daily — would instantly recognize the nonsensical silliness of, say, The Ship of Doom , featuring a killer on the loose who boarded a cruise ship on its way to the Caribbean, only to be recognized by Honey, the widow of a policeman he’d killed. All that in the thirty pages he’d written before he, wisely, quit. He longed to impress her, to show her he could think with thinking.

“I’m not admonishing you,” Kimmy said. “I realize that we both need space. Which is okay. But I do care about what you do, about you.”

She used to be on the archery team in college; she’d once almost made it to the Olympics. She could tie her hair in a knot on the top of her head and would never notice as it unraveled. She ran half-marathons, for the hell of it; she could run marathons anytime she wanted to. He downed the rest of his wine. The door of the fear booth flew wide open.

“This situation,” Kimmy said, waving her hand as if everything around them indisputably constituted the situation , “might be a chance for us to take our relationship to a new level.”

The part of Joshua that wasn’t cowed wanted to ask her whether cock rings and handcuffs were commonly deployed at the new level. But that exact part of him had just unleashed itself upon Ana and then spent time doubled over with severe arousal and then some extra time feeling guilty about it all. Bushy walked in and abruptly rolled on his back to oversee the negotiations from the floor.

Her lease was up next month, Kimmy said, and they could sign a new one together. They would split the rent and he would pay her back half of the deposit she had already put up and this —she made another demonstrative circle, and the wine swirled again inside her glass — would be the home they share. The whorling moves were wholly disorienting, as if she were working to mesmerize him.

He applied the tip of his forefinger to his lips in a gesture of serious contemplation, and he could still smell Ana’s skin on it. Kimmy noticed his empty glass and positioned the mouth of the bottle over it for him to approve replenishment. Joshua admired her determination, her ability to be perpetually goal-oriented — she was everything he wasn’t, a smart woman included. If there had been such a thing as a perfect self-betterment instruction sheet, she would have checked off every item on the list. She was one hairbreadth away from self-completion.

“I don’t want anything to change,” she said. “I just want more of it.”

Joshua nodded, and she emptied the bottle into his glass. Whatever beast was in the oven now reached the early stages of incineration. He’d thought that she knew more than he simply from being less disorganized; he’d believed she must be seeing in him something he had no access to. Perhaps it was his inchoate quality that she liked — he was incomplete: a Joshua without Joshua, a thinker without thinking. But if she couldn’t tell that he was drunk after he’d groped another woman, if she couldn’t see the sludge of lechery at the bottom of his alcohol-red eyes, then she couldn’t anticipate the forms he would assume upon completion. Which is to say that Ms. Perfect wasn’t that perfect, and Joshua stood a reasonable chance. They could, then, perhaps, manage to move on to the next level in the relationship game, the cock ring set to be the transitional object this time around. He would have to be responsible and productive, she would have to be forgiving and understanding; they could keep their secrets and work on the practicalities of common life. Ana would remain obscure in the before, while in the after he and Kimmy would be progressing toward the peaceful domain of grown-up commitment, whose denizens regularly read the Sunday New York Times before a brunch with friends and, if need be, nursed each other through grueling chemo. Here was Joshua, then, at the mouth of the fear booth; he could back out or step in. He offered her his glass for a chin-chin and she touched it with hers.

Joshua followed Kimmy upstairs and put his wineglass on the nightstand. But he never got to drink any more of it, as she expertly handcuffed him to the bedposts, then got on top of him. She bit his nipples; she sucked him while she fingered him to tickle the prostate — hopefully liquidating the evil cell — stopping as soon as she interpreted Joshua’s shudder as the harbinger of ejaculation; she ignored the handcuffs cutting into his wrists. She uttered no word; after she came, she closed her eyes and closed they stayed. Bushy, perversely contorted on the dresser, licked his own asshole throughout the whole session.

Script Idea #69: An S&M male porn star falls in love with a gentle poetry professor. When she is kidnapped by his jealous fan, he needs not only to save her but also to tell her the truth about his life. It turns out she loves to dominate. Title: These Chains of Love.

EXT. NAVY PIER — NIGHT

Guarded by soldiers with night-vision goggles, a column of seven prisoners stumbles down the desolate Navy Pier. The prisoners’ heads are covered with black hoods. Abandoned cruise ships, the Ferris wheel broken in half. The only sounds are the WAVES, the HOWLING of empty cruise ships, and WHIMPERING under the hoods. The soldiers have powerful guns but keep the prisoners in line with cattle prods, which cause sparks and make bodies twitch. They make them line up at the edge of the pier, facing the water. One of the prisoners tries to break away from the gang but is prodded back into line. Each of the soldiers points a gun at a hooded head.

PRISONER

(with a foreign accent)

I am not dead! I am not dead!

The soldiers fire. The flashing guns light up the exploding hoods.

SOLDIER

Now you are!

The soldiers chuckle as the bodies SPLASH in the water. On the horizon, smudges of dawn. All over downtown Chicago flicker the pyres incinerating zombie corpses.

The woman on the other side of Clark had Ana’s shape, her gait. Joshua nearly got run over by a car as he crossed to enter her wake. He wasn’t really sure it was Ana — the hair was different, undyed and longer — but he could still stand to watch the woman’s hips swing: she wore a tight skirt and boots. If it was Ana, miraculously transformed, he’d cover her eyes with his hands from behind and make her guess the surpriser. But when the woman turned and exposed all her incontestable dissimilarities, Joshua, like an experienced stalker, slipped into the Coffee Shoppe. He needed some coffee, he decided retroactively.