Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

“Cindy now vegetates somewhere in Naperville. Married to her high school sweetheart. Which she was banging through Desert Storm.”

“She was in Desert Storm?”

“No, man. I was. Pay attention.”

“Right,” Joshua said. “I knew that.”

* * *

A poster on the wall of the triage room pictured the skeleton and muscles of a skinless human being. You could never see deposits of fat on those perfect specimens, let alone goiters. No one had yet provided painkillers for Stagger, so each time he moved, he winced in excruciating pain. Yet he couldn’t lie still on the gurney: the currents of his enormous energy ran through his body; his wiry landscape positively vibrated with it. A skinned Stagger would look much like the skeleton-and-muscle boy on the wall.

“So what was your ex-wife like?” Joshua asked. After he let Stagger down in the trenches, he was obliged to show interest in his bizarre life. If Joshua had let him cut Esko, it’d be the Bosnian who’d be here now staring at the edited cadaver on the wall.

“Cindy was a fruitcake. She had nightmares about vampires. Vampires sucking her blood.” With his beaten lips he pronounced fruitcake as furcakh .

“Vampires? Why vampires?”

“Fuck me if I know. She read some book and it messed her up. She wrote to me, almost every day. First page, worried about hubby being blown to bits. Second page, gossip. The rest, vampires.”

It was hard to imagine what Cindy would’ve been like, what kind of person would’ve married Stagger. It was hard to imagine Stagger in any form or shape other than what he was at this moment, whatever the moment. In that respect he was not unlike a vampire.

A leather-faced male nurse came in with the New Balance duffel bag.

“Is this yours?” he asked.

The nurse wore short-sleeved scrubs, exposing hairy forearms and chest, a stethoscope around his neck like a pet snake. In the olden, John Wayne days, before the democratic joys of painkilling, nurses used to hold the patients down for surgery, pouring whiskey into their throats when not providing hardwood sticks to gnaw on and stave off pain. Joshua took the bag from him and thanked him with a nod. There was no place to put it, other than at the foot of Stagger’s gurney. A Zen master was once asked what the most valuable thing in the world was and he said: “A dead cat’s head.” Because you couldn’t put a price on it.

The same nurse had cleaned up Stagger’s face not so long ago, but he looked at it again with an expression of concerned expertise. “You okay?” he asked Stagger, who nodded. The nurse nodded too and left. Women never nodded like that. Joshua had never seen Kimiko nod wordlessly. She smiled, she glared, she rolled her eyes and sucked in her lips, she raised her chin and contracted her nostrils, but nod she did not.

“I’m writing a movie script about zombies,” Joshua said.

“What’s it called?”

“ Zombie Wars .”

“You gonna make a movie?”

“Highly unlikely at this time,” Joshua said. “Or ever.”

“You ever made any movies?”

“Do I look like someone who’s made movies?”

“Why are you doing it, then?”

“It’s what I do. I don’t know what else to do.”

“If you need any help with the wars part, I’d be happy to help. Or if you need a stuntman.”

Joshua picked up a loose stethoscope to listen to his own heart. What would a heartbreak sound like? His heart was working all right, but there was the noise of the stethoscope scraping against his clothes and the hum of his blood. There were living layers to him, the body always the last one to quit.

“Zombies are cool, but if I had to choose my undead, I’d still go for vampires,” Stagger said. “For one thing, they can have sex, and a lot of it too. I think that’s what Cindy liked.”

“There’s that,” Joshua said. “Sex is one reason not to go all undead.”

Stagger groaned and adjusted his position, nearly kicking the duffel bag off the gurney, so Joshua put the stethoscope away and picked the bag up.

“Why aren’t they giving you some painkillers?” Joshua said. “We should ask for some.”

“This is nothing,” Stagger said.

“You have a broken arm. It’s quite something.”

“It’s nothing, believe me. I knew this maggot, the only one who ever stepped on a land mine in the entire Operation Desert Storm. Lost his legs, his hard one too. Wheels himself around these days like a welfare pro. Lemme tell you: that’s something.”

Desert Swarm , Stagger slurred. Joshua could feel Bushy’s rigor mortis in the duffel bag; the weight was distributed differently. He couldn’t find a place to put him down.

“Probably no push-ups for a while,” Stagger said. “That’s the worst thing for me.”

A young resident walked in through the triage room curtain. The name tag said Dr. Ehlimana K, as if she’d been named after a homeopathic remedy. She wore a head scarf and looked unhealthy, thoroughly pallid and drained from dealing with other people’s injuries and complaints. Could she recognize and diagnose her own illness? The ability to imagine all the worst outcomes, always calculating the probabilities of your own suffering and death — that would be terrifying. To monitor yourself as you die, to understand what is happening. The Lord is the guardian of the innocent; I was brought low and he provided me with oodles of oblivion.

“What does K stand for?” Joshua asked.

“It’s a Bosnian last name,” she said. “You could never pronounce it.”

“Are you Muslim?” Stagger asked.

“I’m a doctor,” she said. “That’s all that should matter to you.”

“I had a Bosnian friend once,” Joshua said. “A long time ago.”

Dr. Ehlimana K put the X-rays up on the light board and turned it on. Stagger’s arm looked demolished, so badly broken that Joshua gasped in shock. You could pulp a body with a crowbar and it would still live. Bega’s drunken war joke: a mortar shell hit his unit, fell at the feet of the sergeant and took him apart. Nothing was left of him except the asshole, and now he’s a captain.

“Good news. Clean break! No surgery needed, so putting the cast on should be nice and easy,” Dr. Ehlimana K said. “How did you do this to yourself?”

“Fell off my bicycle,” Stagger said. Dr. Ehlimana K ignored the sarcasm. She kept looking at the pictures, as if recovering some lost beauty from them.

“I bet you were not wearing a helmet,” she said.

“Do I look like my brain is not damaged?” Stagger said.

She touched his face to look at the superbruise, then pressed against his cheekbones and temples. He tightened his grin into a grimace of enduring pain.

“Is this from the tricycle fall too? A CT scan might be a good idea.”

“You don’t wanna know what’s inside that head,” Joshua said.

“It’s nothing,” Stagger said.

Dr. Ehlimana K pointed at the duffel bag.

“What’s that? Were you planning to stay in the hospital? It might not be necessary.”

“It’s the most valuable thing in the world,” Joshua said.

“It’s a dead cat,” Stagger said.

* * *

Once Joshua took responsibility for Stagger, it became difficult to be rid of him. And it didn’t help that Joshua felt that if he hadn’t distracted Stagger, the standoff with Esko would’ve ended up in a stalemate, or, at worst, Esko being cut up. What could’ve been is what never happened, Nana Elsa used to say. She never wanted to talk about her experience of the Holocaust. What should’ve happened would’ve never happened. Only what happened happened. Everything else is drek.

Joshua was tired of lugging the Bushy bag, but he couldn’t leave it behind either. His mind refused to engage with the future in which he’d have to confront Kimmy. Right now, he was hungry and cranky. Stagger had finally calmed down only after he’d been given some strong painkillers, but all they’d had to eat while waiting interminably for the CT scan had been bags of animal crackers the nurse provided. After forty-five minutes of convincing the claustrophobic Stagger to lie down and slide into the CT tunnel, his brain looked surprisingly undamaged and sane.