Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

“Gwyneth? Gwyneth Paltrow? You know Gwyneth Paltrow?”

“Are you kidding me? Of course I don’t. Fuck Gwyneth Paltrow, she’s done for. I was thinking of Gwyneth Szpika. A star in the making. Brilliant in Improv Hamlet ,” Billy said. “This is Chicago. We win big only if we place our bets early.”

The waiter spilled water all over the table while topping up Billy’s glass and then dropped a bundle of dirty chopsticks, which danced on the floor. Billy and Joshua were the only patrons in the restaurant, perhaps the last ones before it closed its doors for good and released its indentured staff to pursue greener tea pastures. The waiter kicked the chopsticks out of sight, under some other table, into some undetermined future.

“I’ll be honest with you, Joshie: I need you like I need a broken broom handle up my ass. I got so many clients I’m gonna have to start offing them. Why? Because nobody believes in my people more than I do. Every artist has to believe in himself. Yes, of course! It’s a cliché. But what happens when it feels like all your belief is drained away? When there’s nothing left in the tank? This is where I come in: I believe in you! I’m like a Swiss bank of belief. I keep it forever.”

He was mopping the water around his glass with a napkin.

“See that waiter? He’ll never make it in the world of waiting. Why? Because nobody believes in him. Do you think his boss believes in him? Do you believe in him? I don’t.”

Joshua looked at the waiter. He was there, so he was believable. To Joshua it seemed that the waiter’s biggest problem was plain, mind-crushing low-wage boredom: the pain in the calves, the same demanding assholes, the same Muzak loop, the same orders, over and over again. Meanwhile, elsewhere, everywhere, the world unfurled like a flag. The basic task in everyone’s life was pretending it was more than mere survival.

“I know what you’re thinking, Josh: Why would George believe in me — in me, in this fledgling novice? Why would George want to waste his resources on a client with another zombie idea when all the film crews in the world could spend the next bazillion years shooting only the optioned zombie scripts? Well, Josh, I’ll be honest with you.”

Billy deferred being honest for a long moment, his gaze fixated on Joshua, who asked the obvious question: “Who’s George?”

“I’m George,” Billy said.

“I thought you were Billy.”

“George for clients, Billy for friends.”

“Why?”

“This business, Josh, is a bitch. Let me worry about all that. There is no I in team .”

“But there is am ,” Joshua observed.

“What’s that?”

“There is am . As in I am . T-E- am . The subject is implied in the verb.”

If it hadn’t been for the Muzak molasses dripping from the speakers at the bar, they would’ve been sunk in uncomfortable silence.

“Joshie, I like you,” Billy/George said, his face clouding, “but you don’t even know that you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It was clear there was no hope available here. The pitching practice was now over, it was time to return to the dugout. And for the first time, Joshua thought of himself as a man who knew something others didn’t: he knew Ana; he knew his father’s cancer; he knew the little man in the crawl space. What he knew about all that exactly he didn’t know, but he felt the weight of knowledge in his head and muscles; the door opened, and he was stepping in.

“I tell you what: this is obviously not gonna work out,” Billy/George said. “But I like you, and Graham is a buddy of mine, so I’ll give you some free advice. First, get yourself in the writers’ room, work your way up from there. They’re shooting shitloads of TV in Chicago now, because we’re far more real than LA. Send around some samples, after you clean them up first. There’s lot of passive in there, a lot of college-level wrylies. And a lot of expensive set pieces. You amateurs shoot the movie in your head. An extra shot of espresso and galaxies collide. But get your first job, then get another one, and then a worse one, and before you know it, you’ll be writing for Michael Bay.”

“Who’s Michael Bay?”

“Who’s Michael Bay!? Did you really just ask me that?”

Billy/George put his hand on his chest to affect surprise. He had an amethyst pinky ring. Joshua should’ve felt disappointment, but he felt instead like having won a contest: Billy/George was more desperate/deluded than him; Joshua’s experience now equipped him to see it clearly. The waiter put the check in front of Billy/George, who pushed it over to Joshua without looking at it.

“He just asked me who Michael Bay was,” he said to the waiter, or to himself, or to anyone willing to be appalled at the ignorance.

“Who’s Michael Bay?” the waiter asked.

“Who’s Michael Bay!?” Billy/George clutched his head in exhibitionist disbelief. “Let’s just say he owns an island.”

I know what I know, Joshua thought. I can do it, whatever it is. He had the weight; he was acquainted with the real people; he had things to say and impart. He was a screenwriter, even if he had nothing to show for it. Fuck Billy and George and the whole lot of them! And more than anyone else, fuck Bega!

There was no way he wasn’t going to the workshop tonight.

* * *

Hence he took up an afternoon residency at the Coffee Shoppe and, fueled by a sequence of galactic-collision-grade cappuccinos, cranked out an entirely new scene, and then another one, and, then, another one. For the first time in a long while, he could perceive the far beacon of a finished script, the end of Zombie Wars , beyond which the lights of his better self shyly flickered.

He advanced to Graham’s straight from the Coffee Shoppe and landed on the futon not even glancing at Bega, who was the only one already in the living room, reading the newspapers spread on the desk. His ensemble today featured a T-shirt reading Sarajevo in the shape of the Coca-Cola logo. He had an orange in his hands, which he, for some reason, kept kissing. The smacking sound annoyed Joshua so much that he kept moving his tongue along his teeth, like a gum-bleeding boxer, which consequently invoked Ana’s lips and all that followed. But he managed to get invested in setting up his computer and be conspicuously busy with appearing to be busy.

“I am very sorry about whole thing,” Bega said, without looking up from the papers.

“What thing is that?” Joshua snapped.

“Cat.”

“Fuck you!”

“What can I tell you? Sorry.”

“It was my girlfriend’s cat. She loved him. He was her best friend.”

Kimmy was no longer his girlfriend, nor would she ever again be one, but the lie gave him no pleasure. Bega kissed the orange once more, then started peeling it with his teeth, spitting the fragments onto the unread page. What was he going to do with the peel? Joshua hoped he’d drop it on the floor for Graham to see and then dress him down for foreign littering.

“How did you explain cat to her? Just curious,” Bega said, dropping the peel into a bin at his feet. There was even a box of tissues on the desk, so that he broke the orange up into wedges and lined them up on the paper. “You can tell her he attacked you and you had to kill him.”

“Go to hell,” Joshua said.

“I’m joking. I’m really sorry about cat.”

“And what about Stagger?”

“Who’s Stagger?”

“Your killer friend broke Stagger’s arm, kicked him in the head. I had to take him to the hospital. He’ll never be the same again.”

It was hard to imagine Stagger’s life being any different than it was — it was somehow unruinable, his insanity its armor. The phone in Joshua’s pocket, pressed serendipitously against his testicles, buzzed and vibrated pleasantly, indicating a text message.