Aleksandar Hemon: The Making of Zombie Wars

“Tell me why is that,” Bega said, “last eight presidents have simple names: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, two with Bush. You used to have Washington, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, and then something happened. You can’t elect your president with complicated name anymore. Idiot voters have to be able to spell fucking name.”

Joshua gave thought to the hypothesis but the authentic wine ruthlessly interfered with the thought, which subsequently dissolved like a body in acid. Bega swallowed another shot, then washed it down with beer. What Joshua could not understand was why Bega cared at all. Why would he bother to parse these matters American? Joshua himself didn’t care. Americans would never worry about the names of other countries’ presidents. That’s what’s great about this country. Bega surely was enough of an American now to stop giving a fuck.

“Dukakis,” Joshua said.

“Correct,” Bega said. “No chance.”

On the TV, a retired, Humpty Dumpty — shaped general was now pointing — with an actual pointer — at the map of Iraq. It was clear that he thought it was all going swimmingly, his pointer flying all over the map, as if he were caning it.

“Rumsfeld — a snowball in hell,” Joshua said.

“Don’t know about that,” Bega said. “Only two syllables. He could do it.”

“You’re right.”

Bega offered his beer for another chin-chin, as if to confirm the achieved mutual understanding, and Joshua raised his brine martini glass to meet it.

* * *

Men think, also drink, bond. Deliver lengthy soliloquies built of improvised conviction, incomplete sentences. They touch the biceps of their fellow man, punch his shoulder affectionately; a few bruises — why not? — the marks of shared manhood, of alcohol-enhanced circulation. Men confide, lust rhetorically, copulate hypothetically with women of unacknowledged fantasy. Men outline their life stories and philosophies, relive ball games, take good care not to care visibly about anything. Fuck, they say, a fucking lot. Men don’t even have to be from the same country as their fellow man.

Paco kept delivering the booze while the two men huddled close. Snout to snout, they shared with each other their identifying obsessions and favorites: The Wild Bunch (Yes! Bega: “Last western ever.”); Led Zeppelin (Yes!); drinking (they chin-chinned); Dylan (Josh could not stand the whiny voice); women (Bega lecherously licked his lips); Conan the Barbarian , the movie (Josh: “Isn’t it a touch fascist?”); Radiohead (Bega retching); Pantera (Josh had never heard of them), et cetera. Bega sketched in a beer puddle on the bar a map of Bosnia and the bellicose Balkans, deploying cigarette butts for national capitals. Proudly, he proclaimed: “We surf catastrophe!” as Josh refrained from inquiring who exactly the we was. For his part, Josh listed the relevant points in his drama-deprived life: his Wilmette childhood, tolerable except for his parents’ divorce; a complete set of grandparents, all Florida-based Holocaust survivors, Nana Elsa his favorite; college years at Northwestern, three miles away from his parents’ home, majoring in film studies, minoring in philosophy. And Spinoza was da man , the first secular Jew in history. “My man Baruch predicted movies in the seventeenth fucking century!” Josh spoke excitedly. “He said: ‘The more an image is joined with other images, the more often it flourishes.’” Nana Elsa loved old movies and watched them with Josh—“Good movies are like wine,” Nana used to say, “they need to mature.” “Not like this shit,” Josh said and downed his swill.

Whereupon he proceeded to paint the picture of his hot Japanese-American girlfriend, his beautiful Zen mistress, with the lovely name of Kimiko, Bega’s eyes widening. Josh went on to paint, if with a less colorful palette, his teaching English as a second language to a bunch of Russians and other immigrants at a Jewish vocational school. He watercolored, so to speak, his laptop as brimming with script ideas, none close to being actualized. He finally sketched a bright future in which he would sell a script for a bucket of coin, quit his job, and move in with Kimmy, who had at least once, by her own confession, participated in a threesome.

Actually, there could never be any reason to believe that there would be a future, Bega retorted. We end up expecting it only because we do not know how not to imagine it. It’s a human deficiency, constantly plotting some kind of future — and from that deficiency comes cinema. Unless you’re watching a movie, it is crazy to expect that the present will continue happening — any moment could be the last moment. In lieu of evidence for his claim, Bega subsequently offered the incoherent highlights of what he referred to as his previous life: his two years in the film academy while working on what he called Top List of Surrealists; the fantastically beautiful women of Sarajevo; the orgiastic euphoria on the eve of the war disaster; the drinking, the drugs, the end of it. Finally the war foreclosing and canceling the future while everybody believed that good life would go on forever. “So here I am!” Bega said and downed his shot.

Another round of drinks; more talk; more images on the TV of our troops in Baghdad; the euphoric broadcasters; Paco dipping beer mugs in a foam cloud in the sink; the jukebox playing a plaintive song; the couple stumbling over to fuck in the bathroom stalls; everything as it should be, because it could not be otherwise. Reality and perfection are definitely the same fucking thing.

Another round and Bega and Josh were arguing over what might qualify one for the title of a survivor. Bega adamantly denied it to Josh, unconditionally claiming it for himself. Joshua was by now too drunk to win the argument, even if he descended from an estimable dynasty of survivors, and was presently in the midst of surviving the acid in his glass.

On the positive side, the two men were equal in their inebriation, which led to a unanimous consensus: they were drunk like foxes. “Fuck it!” they chin-chinningly proclaimed. “Fuck the fucking future!”

INT. NORIKO’S BATHROOM — NIGHT

Captain Enrique takes off his Marine uniform, exposing his tattooed biceps and chest. Noriko invites him to join her in the shower. He does, followed closely by Linda. The three of them have intense sex, Captain Enrique’s dog tags steadily rattling.

Suddenly, a zombie rips the curtain off the rod and bites into the man, who has a map of Mexico on his chest, taking out a chunk of his shoulder. As Noriko and Linda scream in horror, Captain Enrique grabs the showerhead and pummels the unrelenting zombie. Fighting for his life, he tears off the zombie’s ear, then an arm. The undead keeps biting into his arm. Bleeding profusely, Captain Enrique finally succumbs. The zombie feasts on his body as Noriko and Linda lose their voices screaming. Soon we hear only their HOPELESS PLEADING.

John Wayne goes to Sarajevo. They feed him, they get him drunk, they show him around. There’s this, there’s that, this is where World War One started, here’s an old mosque. But John Wayne is walking funny, and he finally says: Man, I really gotta piss. They take him to a public toilet. He goes, comes back, his cowboy hat soaked with piss, boots full of it. What happened? they ask him. Well, John Wayne says, I walk into the men’s room and all these guys are at the urinals and they scream: John Wayne! and they all turn to me with their dicks in their hands.

Bega had started grunting with laughter, swinging his torso in the driver’s seat to replicate the urinary lash, the plush dice bobbing with his movement. He’d clapped his hands following the punch line, his mouth open so wide for the roar that Joshua could see his tonsils. It was still funny: walking toward Magnolia after Bega dropped him off, Joshua kept chuckling to himself. So immersed in a vision of regaling someone with the joke was he that only as he stopped by Kimiko’s place did he realize his bike remained locked up outside Graham’s.