Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars

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I’m not going to be afraid. I’m going to be ready, thought Joshua. But ready for what? The night outside was disorderly, with the kind of wind that made him grind his teeth and pinch the skin on his forearms. I can’t even remember what okay looks like . What would okay actually look like? The only okay Joshua could presently recall was watching Dawn of the Dead with Kimmy in his arms. That particular okay was no longer okay and never would be. Ana biting his cheek while coming was almost okay too. He touched his wound as if to confirm that he hadn’t been imagining his life up to this point. Magnolia was deserted, not even random car alarms cared to provide evidence of human presence. No nightingales either. Bega had told him tonight he liked his zombies. He’d been well drunk, but he liked the zombies, and Joshua believed him because Bega had been too drunk to lie and Joshua had been too drunk not to believe him.

He stood under his apartment window, watching Ana’s shadow moving in and out of the weakly lit frame. He’d never looked from the outside at anyone inside his apartment — when he was not there, nobody was there. How was it that time passed even when you were not there, or when you were asleep? Before all this (what exactly was all this ?), there had never been anybody in his space to bear witness to the alleged object permanence: it had to have been possible that all the objects inside his place disintegrated when he was not there to look at them, reintegrating into their ineluctable visibility only upon his return, which was why they always seemed so static. And what would happen if one day he didn’t return? Nothingness would permanently replace the stasis and reign in the space that once hosted his being. Tonight, Ana’s pacing shadow was surely what kept it all together.

The thing with zombies was, Bega had said, the more undead, the fewer living. Moreover, every living person was always a potential zombie. “Bosnians say: we fucked the hedgehog,” Bega had said, laughing and slapping the bar like he was insane, beer bottles hopping all over it. Why was that funny? What did it even mean? None of the things he said made much sense.

The warm wind made the branches on the street titter. The buildings, the cars, the city appeared tensely still, as if wound up and ready to spring into a frenzy. Could nightingales survive in Chicago? Are they migrating birds or do they shiver in tree holes all winter long? Darkness was centered around a burning dot on the porch.

“Good evening, sweet prince,” Stagger greeted him.

“I’m not in the mood, Stagger,” Joshua growled, coming up the stairs. “It hasn’t been a good day.”

Stagger exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke, infusing the night with the skunky smell of weed. “What’s wrong? Tell your landlord,” he said.

“Many things are wrong. In fact, almost everything is,” Joshua said.

“I happen to got a homemade stress inhibitor right here. This shit can smooth the wrinkles out of your grandmother’s ass,” Stagger said, offering him a fat joint. Joshua had already put his hand on the door handle to proceed upstairs, but the little weed light burned before him like a beacon. He took the fattie off the tips of Stagger’s fingers and inhaled a veritable storm cloud. The alcohol burn in his chest reactivated, and he started coughing so violently he had to sit down. His landlord rubbed his back, a bit too supportively. Joshua gave him back the weed.

“I dreamed last night I was a Mexican hockey player,” Stagger said, sucking in smoke. “I wore the skates and all the padding, but also a sombrero. Man! Why a sombrero? I was beating this dude with my hockey stick, cutting his face open, breaking his teeth. But I had a sombrero. Fuck me!”

Stagger passed back the joint.

“Sombrero’s weird,” Joshua said, and inhaled without expectoration.

They passed the diminishing joint back and forth for a while, even though a ball of coughing pain was still lodged deep in Joshua’s lungs. This child of Israel groans from the toil and cries to God from under the weight of his work. “Joint chiefs of good shit, we are,” Stagger announced.

Gradually, the lumps of anxiety in Joshua’s mind and body shrank and then began dissipating. He enjoyed the unwinding; he sagged into the wicker chair. The night was strangely warm. Why hadn’t he thought of drugs before? Alcohol had certainly helped some, but he should’ve been smoking or snorting something every day. Drugs were such a pleasantly simple solution and widely available too. There was a good reason why millions of good, decent Americans took drugs every day, legally and illegally, pursuing their happiness stresslessly and successfully. An idea unrolled itself before him like a beach towel: he could get some real shit, or even some real good shit, and share it with Bernie. It would help with every problem, medical and mental. Bernie was drugged up anyway, but with boring shit. Now was the time for Joshua to explore some truly mind-altering shit while bonding at zeppelin-high altitudes with Bernie Levin. And while they were at it: there must be other things too that they could do together, Joshua and his father. Although he couldn’t think of any other things right now. Abruptly, scorchingly, it was clear how little time they had left to do anything.

“Fucking sombrero,” Stagger said.

Time maybe passes when you’re not there, but not when you’re really not there, because if you’re really not there, you’re dead. Time flows, all right, but it can at any moment just stop. Hence Joshua giggled to himself: life appeared to him exactly like the joint burning inexorably toward his fingertips — once it’s smoked it cannot be unsmoked. Stagger extended his arm to place the fattie before Joshua’s mouth, so that he only needed to lean forward and suck the smoke, and that was precisely what he did.

“They got no idea what they’re dealing with in that fucking desert,” Stagger said. “They think we’ll fuck them real hard and sooner or later they’ll learn to like it. Who wouldn’t wanna be fucked by the world’s only remaining superdick?”

Joshua had difficulties processing Stagger’s claims, so he continued to giggle until tears trickled down his cheeks. He wiped his wet face against his shoulders and inhaled another generous helping of the THC. The Messiah, whenever he decides to stop by, will surely be a supreme drug dealer; the promise of salvation is nothing if not the promise of being eternally high, never coming down. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations. But everyone whose name is found written in the book will get a little sack of crack and float like a swallow in the friendly sky. There will be great respect for the care and the precision, so it should all be okay. Giggling made Joshua’s cheek hurt.

“If there’s pain in every man’s heart you gotta shoot them in the head. Bang!” Stagger transformed his hand into a gun, using three fingers for the barrel.

Pain in the heart was right, Joshua thought. In fact, he may even have said it, but there was no way of really knowing, as Stagger failed to react or acknowledge. Every person is the first person, but who will be the last person? Not everyone can be the last person. There’ll be a lot of fighting over who gets to be the last person. He felt he was sweating.

“The only thing you can ever rely on are your buddies,” Stagger went on. “The jerk-off on the bed above you, from Kansas of all places, like what’s-her-name.”

Who will be the lucky guy to see everything off? To the last person everything is past. There is no future at the end of the world. How do zombies handle time? He should look it up in the Zombie Encyclopedia , under “Time.” If the undead could come back, how would they remember anything that happened in their undead pasts? Would they remember chomping on people’s intestines? Perhaps that’s why they look so spent and exhausted: they can fly to no fucking sky. It wasn’t improbable that Stagger had rolled another thick serving of THC and the Lord knew what else, for it appeared considerably fatter when the joint came back to Joshua. It may have been fattened with hashish, because the smell was now different. Although Joshua had never smoked hashish, so he couldn’t really know. There was so much more to find out about this life, a fearsome prospect if it wasn’t for the fact that life was always almost over. On top of it, he was now hungry like a zombie. And sweating like a human.