Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

EXT. LAKE SHORE DRIVE — DAY

The waves roll against the shore, disintegrating bodies sloshing in the shallows, bobbing on the lake as far as the eye can see. Major Klopstock, Woman, and Boy track along Lake Shore Drive, clogged with abandoned vehicles. Major K has a samurai sword in his hand. Boy moves slowly and whimpers, as he’s overweight. Woman picks him up with some effort, puts him on her back, and continues. A black helicopter emerges menacingly from behind tall buildings. Major K quickly makes Woman and Boy duck. They slip under an incinerated truck at the wheel of which is a charred corpse. The helicopter hovers over Lake Shore Drive, then creeps along it, as if looking for someone.

MAJOR K

Make no move.

Boy whimpers suddenly, slips out of Major K’s grasp, and runs out from under the truck.

WOMAN

No!

She tries to get up, but Major K pulls her back down. The helicopter descends very slowly until it hovers over the boy, who waves frantically at it.

MAJOR K

Fuck! There is nothing we can do now.

The very night after his tryst with Ana, Kimmy crowned Joshua with the silver cock ring. She must have recognized the new quality in him, the depths and the exponentially increased fuckability factor; he was happy to let her bestow his well-deserved reward. He changed, but, boy, so did she. In the middle of the furious coitus, his cock vibrating with pleasure at the previously unthinkable frequency, he could not recognize Kimmy at all — what was supposed to be routine intrarelationship intercourse appeared like an insane one-night stand. She bit his cock’s root; she screamed gibberish like a magic incantation; she growled: “Fuck me, Levin.” I must be dreaming! Levin thought. Just before his climax, she grabbed him by the throat, cutting off his air supply, and looked into his eyes with a fury that scorched the inside of his skull. For a long, ecstatic minute he was dying and coming at the same time.

Kimmy took a day off and they spent their Thursday morning splitting and parsing the newspapers, a commodious couple interrupting the earned silence only to brief each other on what they were reading: The Vagina Monologues had been successfully performed in Islamabad; a twenty-pound carp had shouted apocalyptic warnings in Hebrew to a Hasidic fish cutter in New York; Saddam Hussein was undergoing major ass destruction. He could see himself in her eyes: funny, smart, handsome, and deep. He liked that guy.

Then they went out to Ann Sather’s for brunch. Brunch was an abominably monstrous compound noun, Teacher Josh insisted, but they still shared poached eggs and Swedish sausage and cinnamon rolls. He performed for her the John Wayne joke. Standing up in the narrow passage between the tables to act out the punch line, he was fully aware of the danger of appearing crass, but did it anyway, and she nearly pissed herself laughing. Not once did he think of Ana, not once. Kimmy suggested they invite his family for dinner, Janet included (“ Even Janet”) and he had to tell her that, on top of the acrimony between his parents, Bernie also had “prostate problems.” She didn’t quite understand whether that meant Bernie should or shouldn’t be invited, but she deferred the question, so a day was provisionally chosen and she was going to call them. They watched Dawn of the Dead in the bedroom — required research for his script, he claimed, even if he’d seen the movie a thousand times. He outlined Zombie Wars for her as if pitching it to some big shot in LA: the virus and the apocalypse, Major K, the loyal cadet and the rogue soldiers, the woman and the boy. He heard the confidence in his own voice; she couldn’t wait to read the script; he enjoyed the weight of her body against his. I will walk with the Lord in the lands of the living, and the rest of yous can go fuck yourselves. He was so far beyond feeling guilty: having sex with Ana may have been the best thing he’d ever done; it definitely made him a better man. Farewell, Ana Except, thank you for everything! May you have a kind trip back to elsewhere. And I shall always cherish your dimples. Before the movie ended, Joshua and Kimmy had more furious intercourse and then passed out intertwined, Bushy snug as a bug between them.

On Friday, he kissed Kimmy’s still-wet hair at the door, waved at her in loving slow motion as she drove off to work, and scooped Bushy off the porch. It was a bright, balmy morning. The spring had hit the ground running: the sunlight bent at an angle more favorable to all the warm colors, the shadows were sharper and leaner, the trees were taking their leaves seriously. He was going to call Bernie, see how he was doing, maybe set up another lunch; he was now capable of dealing with that particular situation. Then he was going to call Mr. Strauss and resign from his teaching job at the PRT Institute, and, thus relieved, write Zombie Wars at least part of the day, and then spend the rest of his life writing what he was meant to write. He could see an open, straight path stretching all the way to his horizon; he could see the horseman coming.

Before all that, he needed to undergo proper cleansing — metaphorical and real — and have a shower. Undressing, he inhaled the residual smells of last night’s copulation. He had Kimmy-inflicted battle wounds all over his thoroughly fucked body: two parallel scratches across his thigh; a ring mark on his dick and balls; his throat still sore from strangulation.

He examined his face in the mirror and appreciated the relaxed maturity, the conspicuous new peace, the overbite retreated to a mere bite. Janet had once confessed to him that she’d had a dream in which she’d shot up heroin. She’d been so overcome by the tranquil well-being that, when she’d woken up, she’d tracked down a drug dealer. She’d bought a little pouch of heroin— the starter kit , the dealer called it. But Janet had never shot it up. The needle aspect had been too unsettling, while snorting was too cocaine-eighties, which she despised. She might well still be hoarding the heroin in her drawer. The episode had provided him with Script Idea #87: A woman scientist develops an experimental sex-changing drug she tests on herself; she transforms into a violent man who exacts revenge on all the assholes who disrespected her, including her lecherous ex-husband. Title: Mrs. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Well, here were Mr. Levin and Mr. Sexy, joined in a happy union, looking at each other through the mirror.

He heard the phone twittering downstairs and a rush of unexpected terror surged through him: what if it was her? He was very proud of not having thought of her. And he was certainly not going to talk to her. But the phone rang again and the thought of her — of Ana Except saying, I will have been happy for you , of her tug on his thigh, of her body — the thought of her could not be abolished now, even if the phone eventually shut up. He stepped under the stream of water with a hard-on, which happened to come in handy for excising the thought.

Pissing in the shower afterward, he decided he needed to put some funny stuff in Zombie Wars . The undead are always so damn dour, and the global cataclysm is a superdowner, to say the least. How about zombies at a disco club, dressed for Saturday Night Fever , tottering about to “Stayin’ Alive”? He also didn’t know how to end it, whether Major K’s vaccine would save humanity or provide the hope for survival of a small unit of humans. Hope sold, of course, and well; it was the corn syrup of existence, fast burning and addictive. On the other hand, it was cheap and everywhere. Hope and war: the ping and the pong of America.

He consulted the mirror again: time to shave, even if he liked the weary-warrior scruffiness. The thing was that Kimmy would always get a rash from his facial hair, even on the inside of her thighs after he ate her. Wouldn’t zombies have long hair and nails, given that these keep growing for a while after death? Perhaps there could be degrees in the state of undeadness. Some zombies could be more conscious, so that the vaccine could work differently for them. He put a towel around his waist — it made him feel porny and husbandly at the same time — and went down to the kitchen to get some coffee. Kimmy had turned on the coffee machine this morning while he was sleeping, and now it was ready. She also left a Post-it with a smiling little sun; Have a lovely day! it simply read. With Kimmy there was no stasis. She made sure his life flowed in his absence, an intimation of immortality.