Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

“We’ll figure something out,” Joshua said. He knew he should be brave enough to tell Janet about Bernie’s prostate, but the doctors were surely going to find the diagnosis in his file and tell her all that needed to be told.

“Jackie, I love you. I’d give you my liver if you needed it,” Janet said. “But don’t tell me we’ll figure something out. You do not figure things out. That’s not what you do.”

The old man stopped by at the door of Bernie’s room and looked in. He was akin to an emaciated buzzard, complete with long fingers and uncut nails. He just stood quietly, observing, smelling death. Bernie’s neck was thin, his earlobes meaty and big, his ears enormous. The body laid down on this hospital bed should not belong to the father that Joshua knew. Where did the real Bernie go? He’d actually been born as a Shmuel, but back in his high school days his shtetl name had practically served as a contraceptive device, so he’d introduced himself as Bernie to his first goy girlfriend. In the beginning, and steadily thereafter, our fathers worshipped idols.

“Where I live, it’s all figuring out, all day long. It never stops, not for a moment,” Janet said. “There’s so much more to figure out and I’m so damn tired.”

The old man turned to walk away at a mortally slow pace. There was a dried streak of blood on the inside of his thigh. Noah stood up to follow him, but Janet glared at him until he sat back down and returned to the comforts of Spider-Man.

“You know what Noah asked me the other day?” Janet whispered.

“‘Where do tits come from?’”

“Oh, shut up! No! Shut up! Come on! He’s sweet. No! He asked: ‘Who made the first person?’ And then: ‘Was the first person a boy or girl?’”

“What did you say?”

“I said it was complicated. And he said: ‘I think every person is the first person.’”

“You should be saving money for his therapy,” Joshua said. “It’s going to be very costly.”

“Don’t you think that’s sweet, though?” Janet said. A tear in the corner of her eye twinkled and then evaporated. “Every person is the first person.”

“He can be sweet,” Joshua said. He’d never seen Noah being sweet, not since he’d been a cooing baby, and even then describing him as sweet would’ve been a stretch of imagination.

“Did you talk to Constance?” Janet asked.

“I don’t think they’re together anymore,” Joshua said. Bernie was grinning and drooling in his sleep, rehearsing for a future life in pain-free oblivion.

“When it rains, it pisses,” Janet said. “Poor guy.”

She pushed her hair behind her ear to lean over and kiss Bernie. The heavy earring stretched the hole in her lobe and it appeared enormous — she had Bernie’s ears. She’d been Father’s girl; he’d taken her to baseball games, even fishing; he’d interrogated and vetted her boyfriends, none ever worthy of her. When Doug had salsa-ed his way into her life, the brawny ass first, Bernie had thought him unworthy but had failed to share his opinion with Janet, because she’d seemed so happy. Now she couldn’t remember what okay looked like, and Bernie was out like a light.

“There’s another thing,” Janet said. “His prostate is rotten.”

Joshua turned to stare at her in disbelief.

“I know,” he finally said.

“You know?”

“He told me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“He asked me not to tell you. I thought it was the kind of a secret only men can share.”

“Right. Men and their secrets. Where would we be without them. Except he asked me, too, not to tell you.”

She sat down on the edge of Father’s bed.

“He texted me,” Joshua said. “Imagine that. He learned how to text. Constance would be proud.”

Bernie began to snore, his breathing achingly even and so loud that they couldn’t help but recognize — and confirm it with eye contact — that one day, very soon, Shmuel Levin would end that whole breathing business and withdraw finally from the earthly domain of cruise ships and suffering. Every person is the first person; every death is the first death. Janet’s face was suddenly, soblessly, wet with tears. The TV now showed a trailer for a Batman movie and Noah looked up: a grown man who liked to dress as a bat stood facing a clown in some kind of a showdown. Spandex defeats death: those bastards manage never to grow up, let alone die; ridiculous costumes stave off mortality. Janet put her face in her hands to sweep away the tears.

“You coming over for Seder?” she asked.

“Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll come.”

She grabbed the remote and turned the TV off, then pressed the call button, then did it again, but there was no response.

“Could you do me a favor?” she said. Whenever Janet demanded a favor, Joshua would normally cringe in trepidation, but there was no way he could deny her at a time like this.

“Name it,” Joshua said.

“Doug is coming to pick Noah up. Can you take him down?”

“Take Doug down?” Joshua asked. “Like, off him?”

“Funny,” Janet said, without laughing. “Would you really off him for me? That’s so sweet. The only thing is that, as far as I’m concerned, he’s already dead.”

It must be taking enormous energy to do her Janet-did-it-again shtick every day; no wonder she was so worn out.

“Could you take Noah down, then, so I don’t have to lay eyes on that dick?” Janet sat down next to Bernie’s bed and commenced pressing furiously on the call button. “Please!”

* * *

One day Noah would recall his boyhood in full Technicolor, wherein he would be a thinking, reading, sensitive boy whose parents’ painful rift turned him into a lifelong little patient, for which he’d be entitled to resent them to his grave. It was a safe bet that he wouldn’t be capable of recalling himself as a selfish little scourge who showed no desire to consider others. He would certainly edit out the long ride down in the hospital elevator with his distraught uncle, made all the longer by his pressing twenty-two buttons before said uncle could intervene to stop him.

What was I really like as a kid? Joshua wondered as, floor after floor, the elevator leapt, sped up, stopped. He routinely recalled himself as a pensive boy, who liked to read in quiet corners, who in the movie theater hid under his grandmother’s seat sneaking peeks at Doctor Zhivago . But he was also a lonely boy whose wrath at his warring parents was expressed randomly: hiding Bernie’s wallet behind the wilted ficus; pissing into the paper shredder; dropping Rachel’s car keys into the garbage; reading anything but the Torah at temple; sabotaging Seder by using the Goofy voice when it was his turn to read. It had never occurred to him that he’d done all that simply because he’d always just been himself, a congenital asshole perhaps, that he would’ve done it all even if his parents’ marriage hadn’t imploded so ignominiously. The American story: we reinvent ourselves in order to punish others for what we believe has been done to our previous version. For his part, Joshua was sure that the scourge of Noah had nothing to do with Doug and Janet, yet the boy’s sinister nature would end up buried under the alternating layers of his self-pity and his parents’ guilt. Kimmy would know what to say about all that, as she understood the mysterious ways in which little patients ruthlessly turned into themselves.

“Hey, Noah, let me ask you a question!” Joshua said as they stopped on the twelfth floor. “What are you going to be when you grow up?”

Noah looked at him, not so much surprised by the question as by his uncle asking it at all.

“I don’t know,” Noah said. “What can I be?”